S17 E39: Kurt Wuckert Jr. on BSV & Big Block Bitcoin

0:46Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 39. This episode is sponsored by Cake Wallet and SideShift, Braiins Hashpower, OrangeRock, LayerTwo Labs. And there's gonna be a contest and I'm gonna ask you, Kurt, I'm gonna introduce you, of course, but I forgot to ask you before we started to write down the number from 1 to 100. And whoever guesses the number in the chat is gonna win $100 from Cake Wallet. But we're gonna do that like in one hour to give people an incentive to listen to us, you know.

1:19Kurt, you are possibly one of the first people to call themselves a Bitcoin historian. I did some background research. You ran a print shop in Chicago and the client offered to pay you in Bitcoin in 2012. You've always been a big blocker since the scaling debate started and you found yourself first on the Bitcoin Cash side and then you decided when there was the conversation about further increasing the block size and creating a new faction of big blockers. You were one of the first people to join this BSV.

1:52You are a journalist for CoinGeek. You are running Gorilla Pool, which is a mining pool for SHA-256. And let's talk more about it.

2:03Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, good summary. I've been a Bitcoiner since 2012. My first intro to the block size debate, which has turned into the cornerstone of my career, actually started in 2015. I was raising a little bit of money to try to build out a tokenizing project. And I was one of the people that got victimized when the OP_RETURN got reduced in the core client from, I think it was 80 kilobytes to 40 kilobytes and ended up killing off the token protocol.

2:32Vlad CosteaThat was 2014, I think, yeah.

2:34Kurt Wuckert Jr.It was '14 or '15. It was a long time ago now.

2:37But basically, we had a proof of concept that we were pretty excited about. And then it just didn't work one day. And then I found out sometime in the next 24 hours that like, wait, they reduced the OP_RETURN. And I'm pitching investors on like, yeah, nobody can change Bitcoin. It's this thing that's immutable and unstoppable. And then the thing that I'm building was muted and stopped. And so that was my first inkling that there was problems with Bitcoin Core that led to me looking into like, who's this Luke Dashjr guy? And ultimately, I got bundled into kind of the bickering that turned into the scaling war and all the rest of it. And now I'm here a decade later.

3:20Vlad CosteaIt sure doesn't feel like so much time has passed. Yeah. I promised the people on Twitter that I'm going to ask about the Hodlonaut situation first. And I did some checking with Grok, maybe that he's wrong or it or whatever you call this LLM by Elon Musk. But Grok did say that you took pictures of Hodlonaut and published them on CoinGeek at a time when he was trying to stay away from the public light. I know that recently he's doing video interviews revealing his face.

3:54But this was back in '21 or '22.

3:58Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think it was '21 was his trial. Maybe it was 22. I think it was 22 in Oslo.

4:06So it's funny because initially we had press credentials were applied for and they were denied to everybody. But then Norway came back and said, oh, actually Bitcoin Magazine gets press credentials. They're going to have a full camera crew and all this stuff. And we've decided to open it up to other industry people. And so I was officially representing CoinGeek at that thing. People were not allowed to have phones or laptops or whatever in court unless you had a press pass. I had a press pass. So I had my phone, I had my laptop, I had permission to photograph and all the rest of it.

4:41And I just asked the judge before court started said, hey, what's the ruling for photographs, video, et cetera. And she was like, there's a full camera crew here and it's a public trial. Everybody in this room should assume they are in a public place and do not have a presumption of privacy. Okay, cool. So I can photograph while sitting in open court? Absolutely. Everybody here is in public. It's okay. That was the long and short of it. Now at that time, I was not aware that Hodlonaut had specifically asked to not have his photo taken, which I would have respected.

5:15I actually tried to reach out. We were mutually blocked and all the rest of it. But I had posted, hey, if anybody can get in touch with him, I'd like to have a respectful time here and whatever. I never want to purposely be a troll about things. And nobody got back to me. And again, full camera crew in-house, there were photographers, there was a full video camera set up and everything. So I was like, all right, we're in public. That's the story. So I find out a day or two later, like, that son of a bitch published my picture and blah, blah, blah.

5:49And I'm like, hey, it's not my fault that nobody reached out to give me any feedback. Like everybody, including the Bitcoin Magazine people who I was like, hey, I'm going to be in the journalist pool. And they're all a little bit like, nobody would talk to me. So I was like, all right, I guess I'm on my own here. So that's the short version of that story.

6:11Vlad CosteaWell, the reason why it's such a big deal is that the Bitcoin Magazine people did their best to conceal his face, like blur it or whatever. And he was like a symbol of, you know, the community still sticking to its anonymous roots and choosing not to say who he is. Of course, he was in a situation where Calvin wanted to sue him. And there was this bounty that he put on his discovery or something so that he can hand him the court documents and tell him, hey, Mr. Hodlonaut, you're getting sued. I don't think it was nice this campaign of doxing him. I also think that just looking at anonymous people on the internet and taking them too seriously is a bit far fetched. Like, I would never do that. Sure. But it's unfortunate the way that this unfolded. And I think it did a lot of damage to him. I mean, I used to consider him my friend. I think I still do. Mm hmm. Two years ago, after I interviewed Roger Ver, he spent like a month just slandering me in ways that I never expected from someone that I used to consider a friend.

7:21But it's evident that there was some psychological damage that was done to him after this trial. And he's not the same person anymore. And it's really unfortunate.

7:31Kurt Wuckert Jr.No, I agree. And that's the thing. I didn't really like he's not a guy that I paid attention to before. I knew of the account and stuff. And then all the doxing stuff happened. And then the court stuff happened. And I had posted about it quite a bit, basically saying I don't find lawsuits pleasant. I'm a hardline libertarian. For me, if you bring the court into a relationship, it literally just shows like, okay, you guys had no ability to negotiate a business deal or whatever. And I still see it that way.

8:01There was prodding. Both sides really disliked each other and wanted to let it be known. And both sides refused to back down. And that led to what it led to. And it turned Hodlonaut into a folk hero. And it turned Craig into this ultra villain. I think he was kind of a villain before, or maybe even a supervillain before, but this is what turned him into the ultra villain. And who was better for it? I don't know than anybody who's better for it. And that's almost always the consequence of a court battle.

8:32And so I was pretty clear from the get-go, including people at the time. I mean, I didn't know Craig personally in 2019 or like when any of that stuff started to happen. But when I finally met Craig, I think I met him in 2020. I met him in London in 2020.

8:51It's like, yeah, what do you think? And I'm just, you know what? I don't like court. I just don't like it. I think it's a waste of time. It's a waste of energy. It's always a waste of money. And all that time, energy, and money should be spent on doing something valuable. If you don't have something better to invest in, court to me is always the fallback of people that don't want to have a serious conversation with people. And so I just find it unfortunate. And I'm kind of, I don't know, famous or infamous for...

9:21Because I mentioned it on X. I tried to go talk to Hodlonaut at the end of the trial. It was after the trial was over. Everybody's kind of packing up. I had talked to his attorneys a couple times, journalistically, but he was just trying to be friendly. And I tried to shake his hand and just wanted to tell him, hey man, you ran a good trial. I've never meant you any hard feelings. I'm really sorry that we ended up on this two sides of a war here.

9:47We don't have to be friends, but I really don't want us to go through our lives feeling like we have to be enemies. And he wouldn't have it. He literally put his hand up, just said, no, and just walked the other way. He wouldn't let me get a word out. So it's just unfortunate. I don't like to have animosity with people. And I feel like it's always going to be there, I think.

10:09Vlad CosteaSo assuming that he's going to be watching this, and I think he would, it's the kind of stuff that you would want to see. Would you apologize to him or something for anything that you think did not go well between the two of you?

10:25Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think, you know, and I've written a pretty long apology in the past. I tagged him in it in public just because I wanted it to be known. I think an apology is, you know, it's always appropriate. And just the fact that I think we had a series of misunderstandings. Like, I would like him to know that I don't mean him any animosity, and I never did. Like, we can disagree. I'm very happy to disagree and fight about it and whatever. But I never hated him as a person.

10:51I never wanted to see his life get dragged through. I never wanted to see his life get dragged through the mud the way that it was. And so, you know, for any of my comments, especially my early comments, like when I was asked to comment on it, I was very cavalier about like, I don't know, like, screw this anonymous... Like, he's a jag-off on the internet. It's, like, his full-time job. Like, I don't care. So I kind of gave a flippant, screw you. And for that, I'm sorry.

11:11And the fact that like I, you know, that the things that happened during the trial and all the rest of it, like, again, out of my ignorance, you know, added to his pressure. And the fact that, you know, I know he's got a family and all the rest of it. So, you know, for the sake of his family and all of that, like, I'm sorry that I caused him any grief. And, you know, I just don't want there to be animosity there.

11:34Like, again, we don't have to be friends and we don't have to agree. But I want him to know that I am not his enemy. I'm not hoping for his downfall. And actually, I also read his blog, and I think he's been spot on as far as like his criticisms of Core and the takeover of, you know, Brink and all the rest of that stuff. I think actually, he's been quite good. On those kind of topics. So I'd like to give him a shout out on top of the apology.

11:59Vlad CosteaThat's kind of the ironic part, right? Because it took him like a couple of years to get to the conclusion that he is kind of a big blocker. He doesn't like big blocks, but he's saying basically what Bitcoin Cash people have been saying since 2016 or something before Bitcoin Cash existed. So calling out Blockstream for their funding and the source of their funding and the fact that they had these shady connections with Mastercard, with the AXA group, which is connected with the Bilderberg and stuff like this.

12:33Like this was a common talking point among the big block faction in Bitcoin, the ones who supported XT and Unlimited and Classic and these proposals from Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn and the others. So it took Hodlonaut longer, but he came to the conclusion that, you know, there's something wrong with these people and he doesn't like them anymore and he doesn't want to be on the same chain that they're on. But on the other hand, he's not willing to join the big block chain, which already has like a network effect in the market and is listed on exchanges.

13:11He would rather support something which is brand new and is kind of reductionist because it's small block. It reduces the kind of transactions that you can do on it. It's more virtue signaling than it is like a technical experiment or breakthrough. So I don't know. It's weird to me that the two of you can agree on so much, but find yourselves on different sides of the spectrum.

13:40Anyway, cypherpunks write code. They shouldn't go to court. I guess we can agree on that one. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. So let's talk more about the big block movement. And I think it goes back, you're a historian, so you should probably know about this guy, Dan Kaminsky, who went to a hackers congress in 2011 and he spoke about the ways to scale Bitcoin to Visa levels. And at the time in his slides that you can still find on his blog, which is dankaminsky.com, I think. Unfortunately, he passed and someone else took over his domain and is posting a bunch of crap, but you can still find the older blog posts by him.

14:28And he described a version of Bitcoin, which has gigabyte blocks, which has a large number of CPUs for validation and also a large amount of storage, which gets pruned every two weeks or something or monthly to be able to keep up with the latest transactions. And he also sort of assumed this position that archival nodes, the ones that store every transaction are going to be operated by exchanges, by miners, by large businesses that have a stake in storing everybody's transaction. So the idea of gigabyte blocks, which technically and practically was pioneered by BSV, predates it by how many years?

15:17Eight, seven, eight years.

15:20Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, we probably didn't mine. I think we mined our first multi gigabyte block in about 2020. So, yeah,

15:28Vlad CosteaIt's almost nine years if this was 2011. So I'm just trying to point out that from a philosophical point of view, in terms of having very large blocks, there is nothing new about this idea. What's new is just being bold enough to try it.

15:47Kurt Wuckert Jr.Right. No, for sure. I think another person that deserves a lot of credit from earlier is a guy named Andrew DeSantis. He used to work at Bitcoin Magazine many years ago. He may have even been a co-founder. I think he was there in 2013, 14, 15. But he was talking quite a bit about this kind of stuff and what you could do with unlimited Bitcoin script. And he had a lot of theories on even before Ethereum, like really novel smart contract stuff. And he's like, hey, if the blocks just didn't have this limit and the scripts didn't have these limits, you could build an entire operating system out of Bitcoin transactions and a bunch of the stuff that he was way ahead of the curve on.

16:25And I just think it's a shame that those kind of people got sort of laughed at and kicked out of the conversation. But there was a number of people that were early and talking about some of the outside of payments, and scalable payments are awesome, but people talking about world computer kind of stuff, even well before Vitalik Buterin was. I think a lot of people deserve a lot of credit for having those ideas in a big way before they became our narrative. But you can read DeSantis three, four or five years before somebody like Craig Wright talking about concepts that we now think of as like the Metanet and things like that.

17:07Vlad CosteaYeah. But let me ask you this. You have been a big blocker. What were your opinions of the movement early on? Like, did you like unlimited? Did you like XT? Were you there because you trusted Gavin and recent opinions of it? Or did you follow Craig Wright, who emerged on the scene in 2015?

17:30Kurt Wuckert Jr.So for me, I quite liked Mike Hearn. I thought he was just spot on, like from an engineering standpoint, the fact that he's really the only guy that worked in Bitcoin that had like hyperscaler experience. He was a Google engineer. And so for him, he looked at it and was like, this isn't that hard to scale things. Like we have the hardware, we have the ability to build the software to work this way. But I also really liked his attitude. He was very well spoken. He was very business oriented.

17:58And so for him, he looked at everything as a business problem instead of a technical problem. And so when Bitcoin XT came out, for me, I was like, oh, awesome. This is a really cool thing. And I was just excited to see the experiment. Because Bitcoin was capable of some of these things really early. And then after the big bug in 2010, there was a massive bug and caused 185 million extra coins or something to be minted. Satoshi turned off a bunch of opcodes. Block size limit got added.

18:32He added the alert key, like all this stuff. Like all of a sudden, it was like a security focused major patch job. And that was at the time when there were maybe 150 or 200 Bitcoiners on earth. And so everybody else that came into Bitcoin after that came into Bitcoin with these presumptions that Bitcoin has a fixed block size limit and can't do all these script functions and can't do all this stuff. And so Mike was one of the key people that was talking about all the things that Bitcoin could do in theory, and then had a very practical roadmap on how to do them in practice.

19:04And it's funny because he actually influenced, Adam Back had his proposed 2-4-8 plan, like, oh, yeah, we'll have two megabyte blocks, four megabyte blocks, eight megabytes. So he had like a specific plan. And then Pieter Wuille is one of the most significant contributors to Bitcoin Core code of all time. SIPA. Yeah, his was even more aggressive, actually. He had a plan that was a doubling. What was it? It was like a doubling of the block size every 18 months or something for the course of, like, four years and then reassess...

19:35Vlad CosteaI think that's BIP 102, if I'm not mistaken.

19:38Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah. So, I mean, These were serious conversations until about 2015. And then like if you were Gavin or Roger or any of these people who are like, hey, yeah, we think that's a really good idea. All of a sudden it was like, hey, you're not a Bitcoiner. You're not allowed to talk about that. Like if you bring up bigger blocks, you're going to be eliminated from the conversation. That's like, well, is Adam going to be eliminated? Is SIPA going to get kicked out from the GitHub repo?

20:04Like, what if we just followed his idea? Like, what if I'm just an advocate for his idea here? No, no, no, no, those aren't Bitcoin ideas. But I think it's very weird how it all just kind of shifted. It was a very weird cultural shift that happened very suddenly, which is why for me, I looked at it and said, okay, somebody bought them off. Like, there's no reason that all the people that are founding this company all of a sudden just changed their idea about Bitcoin here. And I think that's the reason why Mike Hearn got targeted so viciously is that he was just like, hey, man, I talked to... We had a personal relationship.

20:39We talked about these kinds of things in public and in private. I have an implementation. I think it's very clear how it works, but the real problem was that Mike was really good at explaining it. And he wasn't afraid to straight up just call something like, I mean, he called like Gregory Maxwell a terrorist and all these kinds of things. Like, he just was like, hey, you're an idiot and a fool. Like, yeah, sure. Maybe you worked at, you know, wherever, but I worked here and here's how this actually works.

21:02And so I think the reason he was targeted for elimination early is because he was smart, but he was also very well-spoken. Similar things for Roger. Roger is also a very good communicator. And so it was like, okay, that's why you got to take that guy out. And, you know, they wanted compliance. And if they couldn't get compliance, it was like, okay, we got to bully the problems out of the community as much as possible. So for me, I guess it would probably be Mike would be my first influence on like why big blocks made sense, at least in theory.

21:32Vlad CosteaFor context, the issue of increasing the block size was brought up by Jeff Garzik, I think in 2010. And he just published, like out of nowhere, he came up with this idea, hey, how about you run my client? It runs on seven megabyte blocks or something. And Satoshi just responded to that, don't run this software yet because it's too early for this kind of upgrade. We don't have enough users. Maybe we can reconsider this in the future. But the reason why he discouraged it was that it was going to be out of consensus with the rest of the miners and the validators.

22:12So Jeff Garzik takes the credit for this and also want to go back a little bit because I mentioned, you mentioned Pieter Wuille's proposal, and that was BIP 103. And it was possibly the nerdiest of them all. So it came out in 2015. It was a response to BIP 101 by Gavin Andresen. I'll start with Gavin's, take them chronologically. And I want people to understand that increasing the block size used to not be controversial at all as a proposal. 2015, we had Gavin Andresen who noticed that, okay, we have this one megabyte block size.

22:51And he wanted to start with eight and double it every two years until reaching eight gigabytes, eight gigabytes by 2036. Eight. It's more than BSV is doing today by 2036. So that's a decade away from now. But my point is that he was super ambitious in terms of where Bitcoin is going to go and how it's going to scale. So this was Bitcoin XT. There is also another one by Jeff Garzik who wanted to perform a one-time hard fork that increases Bitcoin's maximum block size from one megabyte to two megabytes.

23:30Like this is the most conservative thing ever, right? There's a one, you make it a two. They went further with SegWit. Can you hear some music outside?

23:42Kurt Wuckert Jr.No, you sound good.

23:43Vlad CosteaOkay, that's good because there's someone playing Michael Jackson and I'm afraid my video is going to get taken off YouTube or something.

23:55Okay, so this was BIP 102, but the one that you actually referenced was BIP 103 authored by Pieter Wuille in 2015. It was possibly the nerdiest one. It assumed that we're going to hard fork every year and increase according to Moore's law. So you start from one megabyte and you go up 17.7% every year to match the hardware and bandwidth improvements.

24:22Kurt Wuckert Jr.He's very, very specific. Yeah.

24:25Vlad CosteaInstead of targeting a number, he's looking at the percentage with which internet and bandwidth are improved and also storage, I guess.

24:36Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, makes sense. So yeah, I mean, it's reasonable. Like, at least you can lean on a mathematical theory and say, hey, it's not even my idea. It's Moore's law, which is pretty well accepted in the industry. But yeah, no, it's a really good point. This stuff wasn't controversial until all of a sudden it was, you know, like, you're canceled. You must leave the island if you talk about this anymore. But...

25:02Vlad CosteaI mean, you can go back even as far as 2017 and find Adam Back quotes where he was for increasing the block size. It just seemed like, I don't know exactly what happened, but there was a lot of hopium with the Lightning Network that it's going to be the one solution to fix everything. And there was also the Liquid federation that Blockstream had launched, and that was a massive flop. And I'm happy that it turned out this way in some ways because, you know, it's karma. But my point is that we hoped that something with a layer two or side chain is going to fix this limitation.

25:46It hasn't happened. What really happened is that the activity moved elsewhere. It moved to Ethereum, to Solana, to lots of other chains that make hundreds of, I mean, there was a time when an Ethereum transaction was 10 times more expensive than a Bitcoin one. And the users did not mind it. They were like, oh, I'm going to issue this NFT collection and I'm going to try to hustle my way out of making a profit or something. So they didn't care that it cost them so much. And that could have been on Bitcoin.

26:18And that's something, it's like a recurring theme on this show, that a lot of what we see in crypto was initially a Bitcoin proposal. And we could have never had this fragmentation and the situation where there's confusion about which network you should be using. In some ways, it's better because there is a lot more experimentation. Like you're not tied to being worried about the customer's funds and not customers, like the users. And right now, if you're going to propose anything in BTC, they're going to say, well, we don't want to upset the large investors.

26:55We don't want to have privacy because BlackRock and Saylor are going to get scared away or whatever. And decide that it messes up with regulations and whatever.

27:06Kurt Wuckert Jr.Well, and that's unfortunate because I remember the conversations back then, 2017 era, and you would come up with a cool idea and they'd say, yeah, just whatever. If it's a cool idea, it'll get merged into Bitcoin eventually. That used to be what they would say is that, yeah, go experiment. And if zk-SNARKs are great and ring signatures and all this other stuff, every good idea will filter its way to Bitcoin. And instead it's done the exact opposite. Nobody can touch Bitcoin. And so now there's 20,000 blockchains out there.

27:39And that kind of brain drain, I think is the biggest problem. I really think we would have taken over the world already if we would have just not had such a weird culty attitude about just Bitcoin Core, I guess. And just think about all of the, not just the additional, like if you take all the market cap of all of crypto and put that into Bitcoin. But also multiply it because you wouldn't have the confusion cycles and this bridge got hacked and there's $600 million missing and that scared away a bunch of people.

28:13That kind of stuff wouldn't have happened in a Bitcoin system either. And so it would have been a lot more likely that anybody that got into Bitcoin would have stayed in Bitcoin. And then there would have been additional knock on effects. And now we're in this position where if I even bring up Bitcoin, people don't even know the difference. I'll bring up Bitcoin and they'll start asking me a question about Polygon because they think Polygon is like Bitcoin or something. And it's like that confusion cycle, like now I have to be the guy that looks like a crazy person who's like, no, no, no, Polygon is actually like a fork of Ethereum, but it can connect to Ethereum, but Ethereum is not Bitcoin.

28:48And they're just like, okay, I guess this is too nerdy for me. I'm not going to play. And that's the biggest shame.

28:59Vlad CosteaAlso concerning the Lightning Network, which I honestly believed in for a few years, and I used to run a node from home on the Raspberry Pi and open channels with everyone and route like 30 transactions per month, which meant that it was kind of useless in lots of ways. But the biggest reason was that I was running it on top of Tor. So that meant the connection was slower. So many transactions were just routing around my node, not using it. So I was not very useful in terms of routing other people's transactions.

29:34But my point is that if you actually take the time to read the Lightning Network whitepaper, it does mention that in order for this to function at scale, and this means that every person can open and close a channel once per year and transact with that, then there's gonna be a need for 133 megabyte blocks to reach the Visa level of scaling. So there's this meme, right, that people share on Twitter that Lightning Network processes hundreds of millions of transactions per second. But that's not entirely true.

30:11Like, you cannot do that. It doesn't have much liquidity. It doesn't have that many nodes. And the scalability is actually limited by the fact that the block size is small. This leads to a lot of custodians. And I guess this was part of the opportunity that some people saw when they decided to not increase the block size, that they're going to be the next bankers.

30:37Kurt Wuckert Jr.But I think that Dorsey in particular, I think he sees a big business opportunity like that's why Dorsey's companies have jumped in that he sees himself as being like the Lightning Bank. I think if you were to get him drunk and have a real conversation about his roadmap, I think I think that's probably what it is for his business.

30:57Vlad CosteaWell, I don't want to speculate about a particular person. But my point is that there are lots of these federations and trusted systems. And fortunately, unfortunately for BTC, but fortunately for the cypherpunk ethos, the free market has figured out different ways. And for all the crap that we gave Ethereum over the years for being a mess and also making upgrades on a short notice and stuff like this, like they actually onboarded a bunch of people who otherwise would never have cared about Bitcoin. And also did some useful experimentations in directions that maybe would not be enabled on Bitcoin.

31:42So they did a pretty good job on the long run and they sort of deserve to be number two. But my point is that the market, once they figured out that they cannot do something on Bitcoin, they didn't care much about the centralized alternatives just because they wanted to maximize the potential of their BTC. Like, whatever, I'm just going to create a new network. I'm going to make more money off of this token that is native to this network. And the exchanges are going to be happy to list it because they get more volume and more fees.

32:15So we ended up with this industry where BTC is just 55%, I think, right now of the market, right?

32:21Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah.

32:23Vlad CosteaBut not 55% of the total transactions. That's the other thing.

32:27Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, not even close. I think Tether on Tron is like the most liquid and high volume thing, last I checked.

32:39Vlad CosteaWhich is funny because Tether on Tron is like a blind spot when it comes to the maximalist church. Because the Bitfinex people, Tether, are very friendly with Bitcoin companies. Like, they give them money, they fund them, they sponsor conferences and whatever. So they cannot criticize it. So they're going to take shots at Ethereum or whatever. But Tether on Tron, never. They would never say anything bad about it.

33:09Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think that goes to show really what the problem is. The problem is the fiat, basically the endless fiat allure of things has made it that people don't actually speak their mind. They are speaking their mind but inside of a very narrow pathway that leads to more venture capital generally. And like you said, iFinex, which is the parent company of Tether and Bitfinex, they're a major investor in Blockstream and a number of other things. And now they've got a revolving door with the White House and everything.

33:46Like Howard Lutnick was their main counterparty with Cantor Fitzgerald. And now you got like Bo Hines is kind of like, I have a small office in the White House and I've got a big office over at Tether headquarters. And so that kind of thing. They worked their way into creating a new banking aristocracy. I've personally called it the Tetheral Reserve System. And it works the same way. They're like, hey, if you need extra cash, you need a little extra help, you need me to make a phone call.

34:16I kind of know everybody and I got enough money to make anybody answer the call. And so they've become heavily overpowered versus what they actually contribute to anything. And truly what they contribute is the fiat of fiat, which is, hey, maybe we have a billion dollars, but we can create 10 billion Tethers out of it. And from everything we know about the history of central banking, that is a power that nobody wields for reasons of altruism or any other rest of it. Like they wield it to consolidate power.

34:52And that's all we've seen from that group for a very long time.

34:56Vlad CosteaUnfortunately, yes. They're building, I think, a private CBDC because it's unpopular for the government to go ahead and propose a currency and say, well, use this one. And there's going to be a lot of backlash against it. But if it's private and it sort of wins its market share, maybe fairly, but I'm not entirely sure about it. They actually found the product market fit with USDT and they're sort of the bank of the global south right now. South America uses it. The Middle East uses it a lot.

35:33And also Africa. I think there's a stream by that guy, IShowSpeed, who goes to this store in Nigeria, I think, and he wants to buy himself some earrings. And the storekeeper is like, well, we don't accept Apple Pay. And then he goes, well, do you accept Visa? No. Do you accept Tether? And they say, yes, they do accept Tether. So that's unusual. He was in a shopping mall and they prefer Tether over a card payment. Incredible. But my point is that this should have been Bitcoin.

36:11Like we sort of failed to push Bitcoin to this level, and we had too much infighting, too much fragmentation. And then this dollar token, I don't know what else to call it, came and just swept all the users and everyone who wanted to use something like this. But on the other hand, it comes with this promise of stability, that the value is always going to be one dollar. On the other hand, it's not uncomfortable. It's not resistant to censorship. I think there is an account on Twitter, Freedom Dollar or something, and they're posting every day when there are some seizures or when USDT is being frozen in some accounts.

37:01And it's really unfortunate, but it's much more common than we assume.

37:07Kurt Wuckert Jr.People don't know. I mean, they assume it's a blockchain asset and therefore it's unconfiscatable. And it probably is for most people because it's not worth going through the court order and stuff unless it's like a serious money laundering case or something. But yeah, it's no good for anybody. I really think in a lot of ways we lost out on the revolution because of a bunch of that nonsense.

37:33Vlad CosteaYou've got a very funny and interesting story in the chat, and I'm going to postpone what I wanted to talk about just to ask this one question from Alpha Arc 84. He says, Kurt, what if Michael Saylor calls you tomorrow and says, Kurt, I'm secretly buying up BSV, help me pivot MicroStrategy. What is the first thing you tell him to do?

37:59Kurt Wuckert Jr.Good question. I don't know. I've spent a lot of time kind of picking on Michael Saylor in public, not the least of which because I think he's just got a funny voice and stuff. And I like to sort of pick on his... I like his tics and his mannerisms. I find them very humorous. So I kind of pick on him just because I think it's funny. But I don't know. I mean, if you wanted to buy a bunch of BSV and open a treasury that was focused on that, I'd say good luck.

38:29I don't think it's any better of an idea than it is to do a BTC treasury. I think the concept of Bitcoin as a pure treasury asset is problematic for a few reasons anyways. I don't think Bitcoin is made primarily to be a financial asset. And so if it was me, I'd want to talk about some of the theses he's published. And I read the strategy quarterly reports and stuff. And he's always got this big thesis about all the things it's going to do. And then you can issue assets on top of that because you collateralized your Bitcoin and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

39:00I would talk to him and say, look, we saw the Dutch do this. We saw the British do this. We've seen any number of countries try to over financialize without being truly productive. And I think when people think of a productive asset, they're thinking about yield, when in reality they should be talking about the amount of stuff that can be created because you're using the asset that couldn't be created in any other way. And that's the real opportunity in Bitcoin. And so I'd tell him like, look, why don't you use BSV for some of your business intelligence software?

39:33Like he sells software to like the Department of Defense and other companies for data analysis and that kind of thing. Like, hey, you know, would they be interested in having a globally distributed, encrypted timestamp server to prove the provenance of, you know, budgets or something, you know, like that kind of thing? Like run the Elon Musk DOGE-style program that he was running with Trump for the first three months, like run something like that on chain, like make the asset actually productive. So like create the value that you want to see in the asset.

40:02So by all means, go buy a million BSV. That'd be fun for everybody. But use it, like actually show the world that MicroStrategy is using its treasury to create value that can't be created by just letting it sit there. And so that would be the conversation that I would be interested in having with Michael.

40:20Vlad CosteaWell, I think the question is trying to allude to the fact that once Saylor gets involved, it might be sort of the end of the progress. Because this guy just wants to capture the narrative and wants to become the number one guy and tell you what you should be doing, what is productive and what is not. Recently, he posted a series of tweets about discouraging development and saying that actually it's not even that recent. He has been saying this for years. That one attack vector in Bitcoin is just developers wanting to do cypherpunk stuff and therefore increasing the complexity and maybe inserting some inflation bug or whatever.

41:03Not that, you know, it's not the end of the world if you're going to have a hard fork and maybe that trading stalls for an hour or something just to fix a bug. I mean, it happens in banks all the time when they have bank holidays and they have moments when, for example, you can't use your ATM or Internet banking or whatever just because they're doing maintenance. It really would not be the end of the world if Bitcoin had some maintenance too.

41:33Kurt Wuckert Jr.I always say the same thing. We've argued for 15 years about whether or not SPV is a good idea, like offline payments and all this stuff. And you get the argument over, but you could steal that coffee and then you could coordinate a double spend and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, but like we're talking about five bucks or 15 bucks or something. And we're also talking about edge cases and like, you know, if Bitcoin is 99.99999% secure, when Visa, you know, Visa's like 98% secure, you know, whatever, right?

42:08Like you have the certain failure rate that people are willing to deal with. And instead everybody pretends that they're engineering for perfection as if perfection is achievable. And on the altar of perfection, like we basically killed any use case that is like using Bitcoin and simple practical payments because of all these trade-offs that, you know, software developers with a hard line on, you know, security, like cybersecurity and be like, wow, that wouldn't be like that would violate my autism. And that's a bad idea for Bitcoin.

42:40And I always say like, you know what, it should be up to, it should be between the payer and the merchant. Like if the merchant doesn't trust your payment, they need to broadcast it before you leave. And if they do trust the customer, like then that should be their option. And like they forget that there's a human aspect to Bitcoin. And so everybody's trying to engineer their way into some perfect system. It's the same problem with Lightning Network, right? Like they create all these like, okay, everybody's got to do this and everybody's got to do that.

43:07And then you need watchtowers and then you need all this stuff to make it work. And it's like, you know what, you could just have human beings who know each other and can coordinate solve the problem, you know?

43:17Vlad CosteaWell, ironically, there's a lot of that in Lightning because there are many moments when funds could be stolen or something went terribly wrong and they just acted in good faith with each other when they could have stolen. So there is a human element, but it's not being discussed. It's sort of hidden under the rug because I don't mind this idealism, which maybe stems from Nick Szabo literature or something where you want something like a clock, right? And you want this to function and be objectively right all the time.

43:50Of course, clocks still need maintenance. But my point is that people are trying to create systems which are unquestionably objective. And when they discover that they don't work as designed or they have issues, they try to sort of hide that. And that's an issue in Bitcoin and BTC that we pushed this narrative that it's like the perfect money, the perfect asset. It's so good you shouldn't touch it. But on the other hand, developers run into problems. And this is also why there was this funny conversation when they were kicking out Gloria Zhao as a maintainer of Bitcoin Core.

44:28And they were saying she doesn't even own Bitcoin and most Bitcoin Core developers don't own a lot of Bitcoin. And the average pleb is stacking and DCA-ing and whatever. And I'm like, that's because they understand how it works. They see all the flaws in it. They're aware how it can break. That's why electrical engineers or whatever, they only have basic stuff in their homes and not smart home light bulbs and whatever, because they know very well how stuff works and they just want something simple that they can fix. And they're sort of hedging against the future that they don't like. And I don't blame the developers for actually being aware that this doesn't work in the way that it's being advertised. And therefore, they're preparing for a situation where maybe this fails. Who knows?

45:22Kurt Wuckert Jr.Right. No, and it's totally reasonable. And it's a really good point. I'm the same. I work in cybersecurity. I used to work in cybersecurity for many years.

45:32My wife's like, hey, should we get, like, a digital keypad lock? I'm like, no. I want a German handmade lock on my front door that has a key. But it is. It's that kind of thing where it's been tinkered with. And frankly, Bitcoin never really was professionalized. I recently, I don't know, three, four months ago now, I was going over the prehistory of Bitcoin and the whole original release schedule. And the way it was released is actually insane, like a gigantic monolithic file. There's no unit tests and just all this stuff that any practical engineer would have made for the sake of making it that you can split things out.

46:12And okay, maybe this part's broken. And so we can segregate concerns here. And it's just like a one shot, like crazy file. And it's only ever been very lightly tidied up even. Most of Bitcoin's code and the way that it interconnects with itself is still very primitive. It's just wonky. And so, yeah, no, it really is a wild situation when you get to see basically how the sausage is made. And you get guys like Saylor, Larry Fink, or some of these other people that talk about it being this perfect monetary asset.

46:50And it is. It's like, and you have no idea what it's doing under the hood because it's pretty sketchy.

46:58Vlad CosteaWell, I'm not saying it's sketchy or whatever. I'm just saying it's not perfect and it does not do what it's advertised as. And there was a moment, like I point this out sometimes when people say, like the official narrative on BTC is that the serious engineers stayed with BTC and only the libertarians and some businesses left for BCH in 2017. And then I tell them, well, but there was an inflation bug that was found by a BCH developer in 2018. And it was reported, like it was disclosed in a very honorable and responsible way.

47:39In a time when there was an actual war happening for which one is the real Bitcoin. Like if they were actually malevolent and they wanted to destroy Bitcoin, they could have exploited the bug and then say, ha, I told you we were the better ones or whatever. But they sort of removed ego from the conversation. They disclosed everything and they made sure that it gets patched. It was very professional. But this came from the BCH side. And it makes me wonder sometimes, like if the BTC developers found something in BCH, would they attack it or would they return the favor?

48:16That's an interesting scenario to think about.

48:20Kurt Wuckert Jr.I mean, we saw the DDoS attacks against the Bitcoin XT nodes. Like they figured out where they were being hosted based on the IP addresses and they took the whole ISP down, which was a significant ISP outside of London, if I recall, somewhere in the UK. But Mike Hearn had spun up a number of instances and they DDoSed not just the data center, not just like they took the ISP down. And so, you know, that shows something about the difference in values there.

48:54Vlad CosteaSomething that I was going to mention at some point, and you did name drop Mike Hearn at least two times by now in different situations, like when I saw that you interviewed him on your show, I was so jealous. I was like, no, I really wanted to get this guy and maybe bring him up after such a long time. Because for me, it's more personal because I remember reading his article when he said that Bitcoin is a failed project. I think the article is called The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment.

49:23It's from January of 2016. And I was there reading it in a time when I was doing my master thesis about internet governance and stuff. I was spending a lot of time on the dark web, looking at websites and everything was built on this Bitcoin economy. And around the time I really wanted to buy some Bitcoin, but then I saw Mike Hearn's article and I was like, ah, maybe... I was right to not buy it seems like it failed. But then a year later the price went back to $1000 and I was like, I'm so stupid.

49:56I should buy some. And Mike Hearn is still a meme, but I think for the wrong reasons. Because in some ways he was right. Like he wanted Bitcoin to be a payments network. And Bitcoin succeeded as something which is more speculative. And we call it a store of value because the price tends to go up according to this 4 year cycle. Which so far has worked. I'm not sure if it's going to work like this forever. But the store of value thesis seems to have played out to a point where...

50:27I think he rage quit when the price was like $500-$600.

50:31Kurt Wuckert Jr.Sure. Yeah, it was in a trough. It was at the bottom of a cycle, or low, low side of a cycle.

50:37Vlad CosteaJust a year before the bull market started. And it's really interesting because the price did go up. Like if you look at only the price chart you're going to say, well he was wrong. But if you look at the amount of development that went into the Bitcoin project, you're going to be very disappointed. And you might agree that Mike Hearn was right. Because also the large stores or whatever, like when you think about it. Around the time when Mike Hearn wrote this there was Microsoft and Dell and Steam and Expedia.

51:14And Newegg. All of these shops were accepting Bitcoin and they're kind of a big deal. And it seemed like there was momentum growing at least in Silicon Valley circles. With people trying to promote Bitcoin as a medium of payment. After the block size wars we kind of lost that. And there was like a redesign of the narrative concerning Bitcoin. And to me it was never about that. Like when I decided to stick with BTC. I just believed that of course we're going to be a medium of exchange in the payments network.

51:50Just not on the base layer. It's going to happen on layer 2. Most likely on Lightning. Of course we never got to that point. Lightning is still too complex. And it still has failures. And it's been 18 months away for a long time. But the trust of market participants is also diminishing if you look at the amount of coins that are on the network and the amount of channels. I don't know where this is heading.

52:18Kurt Wuckert Jr.There's kind of no reason for it. I mean you can just stake your BTC on any number of a dozen other networks and then use Ethereum as your L2 instead. It's just easier to do and it's more trust. It's more reliable than Lightning Network even if it's more expensive.

52:37Vlad CosteaThat's what a bunch of people do, right? Because WBTC has like 120,000 Bitcoin. So that's wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum. But Lightning and Liquid and Rootstock and all the other layers on Bitcoin are like 5-6,000 BTC in total. You can put them all together. It's really shameful when you think about it. Like so much marketing, so much development effort that went into this. Yeah, so we should actually get to talk more about BSV. I gotta plug my sponsors. And I also need to remind people that there's a contest going on.

53:15There's like a flame war in the chat right now with people calling each other names and whatever. But if you pick numbers from 1 to 100, you register to the contest, which is $100 in Bitcoin from Cake Wallet. So Kurt, you're going to have to think of a number but not reveal it. Like don't say it to me.

53:33Kurt Wuckert Jr.I should write it down. I'm trying to see if I have a pen on my desk. Yeah, there we go.

53:40Vlad CosteaI've had a guest who went to random.org and just tried to get a number from there. So you can also do that if you want. Or you can pick something. Just don't make it 21 or 69 or 1 because these are the first ones that people try. So I'm going to promote possibly a competitor in SHA-256 mining, which is Braiins Hashpower. Braiins is the oldest mining pool. Is the music audible at all? I don't hear it at all. Okay, I'm very paranoid right now. So Braiins is the oldest mining pool in Bitcoin.

54:16They used to be called Slush Pool. And now they have a service where you can rent hash rate. It's called hash power. Right now it's very relevant because apparently the Bitcoin Knots people, the 110ers have decided to rent hash power for the purpose of mining blocks and making their network look like it has more demand. So that's one use case. You can also use it to mine the upcoming eCash hard fork, which is coming out I think in two days by Paul Sztorc. More information at ecash.com.

54:48But you can use it to mine that or to 51% attack it. It's your choice. Or you can try some lottery tickets on BTC, BCH, BSV. You can choose whatever chain you want. You have pretty good rates. And I think now they have something that they added and I got to look it up because it's very new. I haven't memorized it yet. So it's called stable pricing. And it's a guaranteed delivery hash rate contract system. You can rent 256, SHA-256 hash rate without bidding or constant monitoring.

55:25You choose your speed, pool and term one week to two months. Stable pricing. So you get daily FPPS price plus a fixed premium. And top up as you go. No need to fund the full contract upfront. You can also cancel anytime. Check it out. It's on Braiins Hashpower, which is brains with a double I dot com and it's hash power. There's also Cake Wallet, which is the sponsor that's giving away $100 right now, worth in Bitcoin, of course. You can choose BSV in this episode if you really want to.

56:00If you're a fan of BSV, I can send you that. I don't think Cake Wallet supports it. But I can do a swap or something because Cake Wallet has this. It's actually quite smart because it replaces the need for an exchange if you know how to use it. You can buy debit cards without KYC and top them up. And you can spend at any place that accepts Visa and you pay with your shielded Zcash or Monero or Bitcoin or whatever. You can also buy gift cards directly from the app.

56:32So it's quite useful for people who want to live under coins and not touch KYC exchanges. So download Cake Wallet today. They're trying to get to one million users. Another sponsor is SideShift, which is a place where you can swap. What I usually recommend is swap stablecoins for something that cannot be taken away from you. So if someone is very adamant about paying you in USDC or USDT, you can just put your Bitcoin or Ethereum or Litecoin or whatever address into SideShift. And then you're going to get a swapping address for the stablecoins.

57:10You send that to the person wanting to pay you. They make the payment and then what you get is what you want directly to your wallet without any risk of confiscation or whatever. They have good liquidity. They have low fees. But they're not available in the US because of, I don't know, regulations. Which means there might be ways if you know how to use proxies or VPNs or whatever. But I'm not saying you should do that. I'm just saying you can. Anyway, check out SideShift.ai. That's their URL.

57:42And Andreas Brekken is actually their CEO and was one of the most rational of all of the Bitcoiners during the block size wars because he tried Lightning. He supported Lightning. He tried Bitcoin Cash. He supported it. He's looking into BSV to understand how it works. Like he was never tribal. And I respect that. In hindsight, he was one of the smartest people on the scene.

58:08Kurt Wuckert Jr.I like Andreas. I haven't heard from him in a long time. Is he still around?

58:12Vlad CosteaHe is. And he's kind of interested in policy cash right now. He's trying to see how this is going to work. But yeah, he's still around. He's still the CEO of shitcoin.com, which is like his shtick. He's very adamant about being the CEO of shitcoin.com. But yeah, he's a nice guy. I'm going to try to get him on the show again. Maybe like a game show. He really likes these with trivia and whatever.

58:41And there's one more sponsor I need to plug in. That's OrangeRock, which is a place where you can trade without limits, without KYC. It's basically a better version of Hyperliquid brought to you by the people who built Bitcoin.com. And it has lots of trading pairs. It even has leverage if you want to try gambling, but I don't recommend it. But once again, I'm not telling you what you should do. I'm telling you what you can do. That's a very important distinction. And they're available on iOS.

59:13I think the Android app is coming out and there's also going to be a desktop app that they're going to be launching. It's cool because you can do pretty much the stuff that you have on Coinbase Pro or whatever without the KYC. So I very much like that there's an entire industry of stuff that's being built without permission, without KYC, just routing around the centralized exchanges. So yeah, check out OrangeRock too. And also eCash.com. This fork is coming out in two days and LayerTwo Labs is a sponsor, so I got to mention that.

59:46What do you think about drivechains, by the way? Do you think they're a good idea?

59:49Kurt Wuckert Jr.So, I think if we presume that small blocks are necessary, I think drivechains is the best idea to deal with it. So, I've always liked Paul. I think Paul is both a smart guy and a nice guy. He can be a little bit prickly, but it's been a decade of him getting criticized, so I get it. But I've actually had Paul on my show too, probably two years ago or so. But no, I think BIP 300 conceptually I think makes a lot of sense. If you are to believe that everything should be on Bitcoin, but Bitcoin should also have a one megabyte block size limit, then drivechains I think is the most rational response to that.

1:00:33Vlad CosteaI don't see it just as a scaling solution. I think it's also like a way to bring all the features without modifying the base layer dramatically. If you want to have Zcash privacy, you can just add that or just an Ethereum sidechain without changing the base layer to the point where it becomes too complex. Right.

1:00:55Kurt Wuckert Jr.I haven't done a deep engineering audit on it or anything, but based on my look at it, and I looked at it pretty hard probably five years ago now. I was like, you know what? No, this is pretty cool. This is a BTC guy that has thought about how to give the small blockers everything they want and basically give everybody else everything they want and keep it on Bitcoin. So I think he's very strategically came up with quite a good idea, which is why it's funny. I've posted about it a couple of times that I think eCash is another fun experiment in Bitcoin that people should check out.

1:01:34Paul is not a guy that just showed up a week ago and said he's going to fix Bitcoin. He's been around for more than a decade and it's just a bunch of good ideas. The ideas I agree with, the things that he wants to exist in the world because of the technology are things that I think are good. I'm a fan. I wouldn't say I'm a supporter exactly, but I like the ideas and I like Paul.

1:01:58Vlad CosteaYeah, he's one of the smartest people I've met in this industry. And what I respect about him is that he is open to new ideas. So he doesn't follow ideology. He follows the truth. I guess that's why he's so obsessed with Truthcoin or whatever, which was going to be his prediction market project. And I respect this, trying to find the truth. And it's something that you get in time. It's not obviously something that you deduct immediately. But he is honest in the way that I perceive him. And he's not trying directly to sell anything.

1:02:36He's very bad at promoting his own work. I sort of poke him sometimes and I'm like, Paul, just try to be in PR mode for a minute. I remember seeing him on stage in Nashville at the Litecoin Summit. He was trying to get the Litecoin people to adopt BIP 300. And halfway into his presentation, he started talking about how you can remove BIP 300 if you don't like it. I was just face-palming. Like, dude, just try to be positive for 20 minutes. Finish your presentation. You can say this off stage if you want.

1:03:09But it's almost like you don't have faith in your own work and you think they're going to want to remove it.

1:03:18Kurt Wuckert Jr.Oh, it's, you know, abuse victims. It's the same thing, right? It's like a guy who was raised by abusive parents doesn't know how to talk to a girl at the bar. You know, hey, can I buy you a drink? You don't have to. I can leave after, you know, it's like, come on, man.

1:03:33Vlad CosteaBut I love Paul. Anyway, let's talk about BSV stuff.

1:03:36Kurt Wuckert Jr.Sure.

1:03:37Vlad CosteaAnd I'm curious, what was it about BCH that made you not feel satisfied? Like there was this moment in 2018, I think November, I was following Fork Wars, which was a very funny website showing what's going on. And it was even playing the cafeteria song from Star Wars in the background. I remember that so well. It was so well built. I miss that kind of spirit in our community. And I was following to see what's happening, to see how much of the hashrate is supporting the Fork.

1:04:12And what's your perspective on it? What happened at the time? Why was it necessary for big blockers to have a split?

1:04:20Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think, I mean, in hindsight, at the time, you know, for me, it was very like I was blindsided by it. I personally, I had a decent casual relationship with Roger. I wouldn't say we were friends, but we had spoken. He was somebody I respected. I had a relationship with a few of the people at Bitcoin.com. I was hosting a Bitcoin.com sponsored meetup. I hosted the Bitcoin Cash Meetup in Chicago. We had talked a little bit about me maybe doing a podcast on their network and things.

1:04:50I mean, we were friendly. We were not enemies at all. And frankly, from a social standpoint, I had more friends on the Bitcoin Cash side of that split too. So I was really bummed, like how it played out. But part of it was when it split, for me, it was the fact that like BSV had no intention to split. Like the SV node existed for something like five or six weeks before the split actually happened. And there were pools, like there was a pool called Mempool and there was another pool called BMG Mining.

1:05:26And they were trying to mine pretty big blocks on Bitcoin Cash. And I think they were hitting 30 megabyte blocks, that kind of thing. Like they were hitting pretty big numbers for the time and talking about like the necessity for opening up more script and opening up more space. And there's some big ideas coming. And then stuff started getting argumentative with Amaury, very specifically Amaury Séchet, who now the Bitcoin Cashers will agree with me was like a backstabbing psychopath. But at the time, Amaury was very much the like, oh no, he's the genius in the room.

1:05:56And he starts pushing these things that I think were designed just to piss Craig off. So like things like pre-consensus. So he was talking about like avalanche pre-consensus as like an overlay layer on top of Bitcoin Cash and some of these things. And I think they were designed specifically to trigger Craig. And the reason that I say that is that as soon as the chain split, those conversations went away. Like they never even got implemented in Bitcoin Cash. I think they now have on his eCash chain, but not that anybody cares at this point.

1:06:26But the point is that I think Amaury specifically poisoned the well because he wanted Craig gone and he wanted Craig gone because Craig would bicker with him about technicalities on things. So he'd have a big idea and he had a big ego and then Craig would have a big idea and also a big ego and they just, they couldn't be in the same room together. And so I think it was decided in somebody's dark corner that, hey, we need to get rid of these BSV people, most explicitly Craig.

1:06:55And the reason I say that I think it was planned on their side to create the split versus the BSV people who genuinely wanted to just grow Bitcoin Cash is the SV node didn't have replay protection. It didn't have any software created in order to keep a split persistent and all these different things. And so when the chain split, everybody on the SV side was forced to scramble to try to figure out like, oh shoot, now all of our wallets don't work. It basically was a huge kick in the shorts for the BSV people.

1:07:28But if you look at the live streams from that night when it happened, all the Bitcoin.com people and all the Bitcoin ABC, they're all, they're cracking out champagne. Like, oh good, there was a split, they're gone and this and that. And it was like, oh, you guys didn't even want to, you know, like I thought this was a competition among people who disagreed but respected each other. And it turns out it was, you know, it was like a coup against people that you hate and don't want to talk to anymore.

1:07:56And so to me, I was like, man, that just like, I just felt like that was really, just really dishonorable, frankly. And so I kind of at that point went and kind of introduced myself to the BSV camp a little bit. Like I knew them too, but they weren't my close group of friends. But, you know, I started saying like, hey, you know, I really think this was like a backhanded or underhanded move. And I think the other thing that shows it is that the mining on the BSV side, like hash power, like they pulled their hash power from BTC and other things to give a huge chunk of hash rate to BSV.

1:08:35And for like 10 days before the split to signal, this is how much hash rate is signaling for the SV node version of Bitcoin Cash. And nobody did that on the BCH side until like an hour before the split. All of a sudden, Roger, and what it looks like, I don't know explicitly, so I don't want to say this is exactly what he did. But what I think he did is he pulled his customers' hash power off of BTC and put it on the Bitcoin ABC version of Bitcoin Cash to then, you know, eclipse the SV hash power to cause the split.

1:09:09And then they had these rolling checkpoints to make sure that a reorg actually couldn't happen, even if there was more hash power on one side. And so like the SV side people burned their own money and screwed up all their own tooling and all their own apps and everything for the sake of saying, hey, we really want Bitcoin Cash to be the big block version of Bitcoin. We want to restore Bitcoin on Bitcoin Cash. And the people that became Bitcoin Cash literally did a bunch of things that were very underhanded in order to just split us off and get rid of us, despite the fact that we were pretty authentically, you know, trying to solve the problem that we thought we were all there to solve.

1:09:48And so for me, I just looked at it and said, you know, I can't work with the Bitcoin Cashers at this point. Like, I think they were very dishonest in the way that they came at this hash war. And so for me, I was done for social reasons. I said, you know what, I just I can't trust those people anymore and they don't want to scale like that. That to me was the. You know, like, why would you kick us out for wanting to raise the block size and restore more Bitcoin like we're not we're not asking you to do anything that wasn't an original Bitcoin thing.

1:10:16So why are we the villains here? Like it was literally only for either personal reasons or some underlying reason that I wasn't aware of. But either way, I didn't want to have anything to do with it. And so I looked at it and said, you know, the BSV people want to do the big block experiment all the way. And that's that's the thing that I care about. So that's the direction I'm going to go.

1:10:34Vlad CosteaIt's really interesting that it wasn't technical, per se, and it was more about a bunch of people not liking each other. And it's super unfortunate because these guys are all Bitcoiners, right? Like we started from the same genesis block. We adopted the same one network. And then we decided in 2017 to split. And then there was another split in 2018. And who won from all of this? Tether.

1:11:03Kurt Wuckert Jr.Right. Exactly.

1:11:05Vlad CosteaLike we're so concerned with which one is going to be the future of money and which one is going to fulfill Satoshi's vision to have every transaction on this network. And then where did we get? It's almost like it's engineered to divide and conquer.

1:11:23Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, it does feel that way. I mean, I've definitely had that conversation from a, you know, put my tinfoil hat on and say, OK, well, who benefited from this the most? And then let's follow that money. So it's unfortunate. It is.

1:11:40Vlad CosteaSo what was it like? You know, there were like a couple of days when the fork was really happening and everyone was following fork.wars, I think was the URL or forkwars.net, something like that.

1:11:55Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, it was one of those. Yeah.

1:11:58Vlad CosteaDo you remember where you were around the time and what you were doing?

1:12:02Kurt Wuckert Jr.I was actually on a live stream when the split happened. We were up all night. It was probably one or two a.m. By the time I was like signed off and said, OK, I'm done. Like it's been 20 blocks or something now. And something obviously happened that we weren't planning on. But I was talking to, you know, I had group chats going, all this stuff. And I actually remember watching Andreas Brekken live. I think he was on the Bitcoin.com stream. And he was kind of going through because he was a little unclear as to what happened.

1:12:35He's like, this is all this is a little sketchy. And Amaury started saying, hey, here, I'm pushing a patch up. Everybody needs to update their nodes like right now amid this thing. And I remember Andreas saying like, well, that's pretty risky. Like you're going to get BitPay and Coinbase and Kraken and all these people upgrade their nodes in the middle of a hash war. And so live on the air, he's sitting on his laptop and he goes, oh, like this is his quote. He goes, ooh, we fucked up.

1:13:03And then somebody else on the stream, I don't remember who it was, somebody else was like, what? What happened? He's like Amaury added a rolling, I think it was a 10 block checkpoint. So every 10 blocks it checkpoints to make sure that it's running on Bitcoin ABC so that it literally can't be reorged by another client. And then Andreas basically starts bitching about it. And he's like, oh, so he starts saying this is really underhanded. Like we're not having a hash war. This was all fake. This was a ceremony.

1:13:33And at that point I was like, okay, I'm going to bed. Like this is really frustrating. And then I wake up the next day and I remember talking to like Ryan X. Charles and a couple of the people that were kind of on both sides. Like they ended up on the SV side, but they weren't heavily committed to one or the other. And Ryan was like, man, like this sucks. I was trying to raise money. Like he used to work at Coinbase. He was like one of their founding engineers at Coinbase.

1:14:03So he had a good relationship with a bunch of the brass at Coinbase. And he was like, I wanted to raise a bunch of money to make Money Button this amazing thing on Bitcoin Cash. And now I don't know what to do because I feel stabbed in the back too. And he's like, and now do I add replay protection to make it a specific BSV wallet or do I go over to Bitcoin Cash because I wanted to raise this money? And so there were a handful of people that were in that same situation that were like, ah, man, like I've really put a lot of work into being Bitcoin Cash.

1:14:31But they sort of grouped me in with like the Craig group and like I'm this villain now. So just all of a sudden it was like an unexpected breakup for a lot of people. And so I remember watching just how somber the people were on the SV side. Like it was basically just a lot of sadness. And then my Bitcoin Cash friends, who I'm still friends with at that point, I'm like, hey, so what do we want to do about like the meetup? And they're like, oh man, like this is awesome.

1:14:56Now we can do like, so it was like completely different attitude on the other side. And it just, for me, I had like a week where I was like, okay, what do I actually want to do here? Like who actually wants to scale Bitcoin and all these other things? And so I had to do some soul searching. And then I remember talking to people like Connor Murray, who had a significant podcast at the time. He works for BSVA now. And then a handful of other people, probably five or six other people who I was close with on the SV side and was like, hey man, what are you going to do?

1:15:27And everybody was a little bit like, man, I don't know. I'm just kind of bummed out. Like give me a couple of days to like catch my breath and think about it. So the immediate aftermath really was just kind of, it was sadness because it was like we were fighting the war on different terms, like mentally, like we wanted to make Bitcoin Cash great. And the other side just wanted us to leave. So it was mostly a bummer for the first few days. And then ultimately, like the decision was like, I remember hearing Steve Shadders, who used to be the head engineer and a guy named Daniel Connolly, who was the head of the node software.

1:16:06And he was like, you know what, I'm working on replay protection. We're just going to do it. Like we'll make the split permanent. Like we don't want it to be, but they obviously don't want to cooperate with us. So like, what's the point? And then we're going to move forward. Like we have our own scaling roadmap and now I guess we don't have people that want to fight us on it. So we want to have two gigabyte blocks in a year or something. And then we want to open it up.

1:16:32Like we want to really do the Bitcoin experiment. And so I was like, you know what, that sounds cool. So I guess I'll do that. And that was it. So for me, it really was just a little bit of a like, all right, be bummed out for a couple of days and then just get on with the work.

1:16:50Vlad CosteaI want to ask you something which you can maybe refuse to reply to if you don't want to reveal this information. But when I had Peter Rizun on, he told me that his approach to forks was that he kept both coins. So he says he still has his BTC, he still has BCH and also he claimed his BSV and he used them strategically over time. Are you in a similar situation or did you sell everything for BCH and then BSV?

1:17:21Kurt Wuckert Jr.No. So I actually take the same advice. And it was advice that I got from Daniel Krawisz initially. He's another friend of mine. And he said, look, man, if you just hold all forks, like you can have a clear head about all these decisions. Like it doesn't have to be like you can have a purely philosophical discussion. It doesn't have to be a sales pitch, basically. Like you're not financially committed to any one of those things. And so I never had a ton of Bitcoin anyways.

1:17:52Like at the time when I could have been acquiring Bitcoin early, I was poor. I was in my late 20s and I didn't have a lot of extra money to buy a bunch of Bitcoin. But I did pretty well on it. I did sell a pretty big chunk in 2017 just because the price went way up. And I was like, wow, I could maybe pay my house off and that kind of thing. So I did a little bit of that. But after that chunk, I kept the rest of my old Bitcoin.

1:18:17So I have some old Bitcoin that are left unsplit and that's kind of my long-term nest egg. But I haven't bought Bitcoin. I don't think I've bought any Bitcoin other than BSV since probably, I don't know, probably right around the split, 2018, 2019. I kind of stopped caring about accumulating anyways. But even still, I don't hoard a big stash of BSV because I think it's going to go to the moon either. So it's not really where my head's at on it. It's not like every month, I need to buy 50 more BSV because I'm going to be rich someday.

1:18:51I just don't think of it that way. So for me, I've always been self-employed. I've been self-employed since I was 19 and I'm 40 now. So for me, it's about business. I like to work. I like productivity. I like working with my teams. So anyways, my position on Bitcoin is not based on I've become very poor or whatever. I have benefited from BTC's price rise and it has certainly offset the losses on sitting on Bitcoin Cash and BSV, but it just kind of is what it is.

1:19:25So yes, I am a, what do you call it, the Satoshi index or whatever is what I'm holding as unsplit UTXOs.

1:19:35Vlad CosteaOh, that's smart. That's a good way of doing it. And it also goes to show, you know, I bet that a lot of people in BTC, a lot of the guys who identify themselves as plebs and will call you the worst of shitcoiners or something, they probably have much less Bitcoin than you have and you don't have a lot, but they most likely have like 0.1 or whatever and they're flexing.

1:19:56Kurt Wuckert Jr.I've always assumed that. Some guy put a hundred bucks into it and now he's laser eyes and all the rest of it.

1:20:07Vlad CosteaYeah. So that's actually good advice. That's something that you should follow, too. I'm talking to the listeners, because there's gonna be, there already is, like, Luke Dashjr's fork, and there's also gonna be Paul's fork. Like, don't lose your shirt going all-in on anything. Just keep it, it doesn't cost you anything, really. Of course, you can argue, well, if you have conviction in something, you go all-in. That's something that you can do, but you can't really predict what's gonna happen with the market, and it's way beyond your control. If you think you're gonna move the needle or something just because you go all-in, that's not really true. There are much wealthier people around you who can move the needle. There are exchanges that have a lot of control. They can suppress prices. They can delist, they can list. There's a lot of politics, right, that you don't think about.

1:21:06I also know that BSV was subjected to a lot of politics, and I think one of the first exchanges to delist and start this movement of trying to phase out BSV was Binance. I remember when it happened. I think it was in April of 2019 that CZ tweeted that BSV is delisted from Binance, and then it was like a large wave of exchanges that decided to delist it. And the few people... I think Paolo Ardoino from Bitfinex, who I think still is the CTO, or was at the time, he had one of the most level-headed approaches, and said, because of course some angry guys were telling him, "Why do you still support BSV?", and he explained very eloquently that it's part of the price discovery process. And if he's gonna delist it and everyone's gonna delist it, if it's gonna be only traded on a couple of exchanges, then the price discovery is not gonna be healthy, right? So there needs to be at least a handful of places where you can trade it, so that people can do arbitrage, first of all, so that the price is discovered fairly. Not just, if someone buys $100 of it on the only exchange, the price is gonna go up a lot.

1:22:31Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah. Yeah, man. I mean, it's a good point. It was a very weird thing to watch happen, because it's like, you know, lawsuits and unpleasant people and whatever. And it's like, you know what? If you look at corporations, corporations sue each other all the time. Like, "Oh, you're violating my patent here." Okay, so these teams are gonna go to court and whatever. But the CEOs don't stop having dinner, you know, having friendly relations and that kind of thing, right? It's not like Nasdaq is gonna cut somebody out, like, "Oh, wait, you can't call him an asshole on the internet and then sue," you know, these kinds of things. And so, which was a little bit my point about Hodlonaut when that came up, is I was just like, I don't know, is it that big of a deal? Like, if you guys want to just fight and fight and fight and fight, like, you should expect the fight to just keep getting more and more toxic. But that's just how people are, right? And so for it to turn into a, like, "Ah, we're gonna circle the wagons here, and we're gonna punish BSV because Craig's an asshole," you know, it's just a little bit like, "Oh, okay." Like, that's a leap, in my opinion.

1:23:33But I don't know, I get it, that it's just individual people and whatever. And I actually think it points to how small the whole crypto space really is, right? That it's like we're still just a very small group of people, that if two people are fighting from two separate camps, it actually starts to ripple out and impact everybody. And I think it shows the, not just immaturity as people, but it shows the immaturity of the collective culture, is that we're still very much in the cradle, if that's how we're gonna behave about things. So, yeah.

1:24:12Vlad CosteaSo what are the largest businesses or investors in BSV today? Where does the money come from? Because I do see people building stuff. I think I've seen Elon Moist, who is this frog character on Twitter, who said he's gonna launch Twetch once again. I also promised him that I'm gonna post this episode on Twetch. I don't know how to do that, but I'm gonna try it just for him.

1:24:35Kurt Wuckert Jr.It'll go up there. Yeah. No, he's a good dude, first. He's a personal friend, actually. So, we met through BSV, but we've become friends. And yeah, he's a guy that just believes in it. And for him, he looked at it, and he didn't like Jack Dorsey. He didn't like that Twitter started as an open-source protocol. Twitter, like, there used to not be an official Twitter app, for example. There were six, seven companies that made Twitter clients that you could download and interact with this open Twitter communication protocol. And then Jack locked it down and said, "Okay, we're getting rid of all the fake Twitters. Now you gotta pay for the API," and all this other stuff. And he looked at that and said, "Man, what if tweets could be etched on a blockchain and released as an open protocol?" And so that's where the name Twetch comes from: it's tweets etched, is where the name got put together.

1:25:24You know, and I heard that idea and I was like, "Man, that's awesome." Because if information can't be censored by anybody, like, if it's just on chain, and you can use an open client, you can read that client, you can read and write to it... I do hear that.

1:25:47Vlad CosteaYeah, I'm gonna get up and close my window.

1:25:51Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, no problem. But if you can... Should I pause?

1:26:16Vlad CosteaYeah.

1:26:19Kurt Wuckert Jr.So, as I was saying, you know, the power of information, right? Like, I think about who are the people that have turned themselves into billionaires over the last 25 years. There's not that many people that have become billionaires in the last 25 years, but all of them that have done it have done it in the data economy. So you got, like, your Mark Zuckerbergs or Jack Dorsey, or, you know, in other ways, it's like people like Palantir, or now it's these AI startups. But ultimately the thing that they're monetizing is data. And what I really liked about Elon Moist and the idea of Twetch is that he's allowing the individual to monetize their own thoughts, that, like, they're monetizing their own data, and they also own it. Like, their keys, they can leave with their information from Twetch, or people can spin up a client that is compatible with the underlying communication protocol, and they can make it like, I could make a, you know, Kurt Social that interacts perfectly with Twetch. And in fact, there's another site, and they're a sponsor of my podcast, they're called Treechat. So you can go to treechat.com, and you can see Twetches on Treechat and you can see Treechat posts on Twetch, because they're all using the same underlying communications protocol.

1:27:22And, like, that's an extremely powerful thing, because, you know, we're not allowed to talk about all kinds of things, right? I mean, like, if you start talking about the wrong countries, or you start talking about the wrong ideas, or the wrong political parties... And you know, you're Romanian. I don't know how old you are, I don't know if you lived through, like, the, you know, Ceaușescu and end of that era. But, you know, people want to shut you up if you're too inconvenient to the system. And the technology gives you that ability to speak through the noise, because you're paying, you know, a tenth of a cent or whatever to make a post that nobody can delete. And, like, to me, I looked at that and was just like, "Man, that's it. That is maybe the most important thing that we could be doing." And so Twetch, to your point, is a good example of a guy that's just got a completely independent business that he really believes in. It kind of can only work on BSV. And, you know, that's just great. Then I look at other players.

1:28:32I mean, my company is a good example. You know, Gorilla Pool: we provide infrastructure, and we build some software. We have apps and stuff, too. We're completely independent. It's me and two buddies, put in a chunk of money, enough to mine for, like, five years, and then reassess and see if we were crazy. So far, yeah, we mostly seem like we're crazy, but, you know, we've got some sources of income. We sell data to, like, people that are working in, like, data... Well, we were selling to people working in data science, and then a bunch of that turned into, like, AI sterility stuff. So we have a little bit of that. I'm trying to work us into more of that, like, "Hey, if you write this data, you can encrypt it, you can hash it, you can timestamp it.

1:29:14You know that the data is real. And then you can access that for a fee. We'll host it and give you a paid API," basically. And so there's stuff like that. And then, you know, the most significant player is Calvin Ayre, and he has been since the beginning. So he has his investments into things. And I think one of the big ones coming out of that side of things is a company called Tokenovate. The CEO is a guy named Richard Baker. He is basically doing, similar to what I'm doing with, like, data provenance on, like, the AI side, he's doing with financial stuff.

1:29:46He used to work in, like, the London Stock Exchange, so he has a bunch of, like, real-world financial business connections. And he's like, "Hey, you know, there's all these little third-party connectors that go between various trading entities that all have, like, hotlines in between each other, but they still have their own trust problems." And so he's got a, basically allowing the state of different people's books to be hashed to the chain on a recurring interval, such that when it's received at another institution, it can be proven with proof of work that the actual financial data is valid. And so he gets paid to do that kind of work. So those are a few examples of people using, like, the data aspect of the chain for some pretty novel things.

1:30:33Vlad CosteaRight. This is something that I was gonna ask about, because the perception overall is that Calvin Ayre is, like... Is it "Air" or "Airy"? But anyway...

1:30:44Kurt Wuckert Jr.It's "Air."

1:30:45Vlad CosteaHe's perceived as the largest investor in BSV, and possibly the one who keeps the whole network alive. And I'm trying to understand if there's anything more to this, like if there are more people investing and building.

1:30:56Kurt Wuckert Jr.I mean, I think it's pretty public, you know. Calvin's invested, I don't know, to the tunes of, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars or something to that effect. I mean, he owns the biggest mining company in the space. Like, nChain had, like, 300 employees at it for the better part of a decade. I think that's quite a bit less now, you know, and various other things. So, I mean, he has put in a significant amount of money, almost certainly more than anybody else. But there's also, you know, when I think of other venture capitalists that have put money into some big ideas, you know, you had guys like Christian Baha, I think he's a German venture capitalist, totally independent guy that's invested in a few companies, a guy I've had a couple of conversations with, and I didn't like his terms, but, you know, we talked about it.

1:31:40I've talked to Vinny Lingham more than once, who's very interested in things, and he's told me, you know, if he can cross this threshold or that threshold, like, I'd be an investor here for him. And I have a feeling he's got a big stack of BSV sitting somewhere, and might also be consulting some people. But there are also, you know, a couple of other independents. I actually have a relationship with a guy from one of the big... So I actually posted about this on X, and a bunch of people think I'm full of crap, but I gave a presentation recently at one of the biggest banks in the world.

1:32:14I was out in New York City, I was up on, like, the, I don't even know, 70th floor or something, explaining why their 24/7, 365 trading should be done on BSV using BSV tokens. And, like, we went over a whole audit. We had an auditing firm check the stuff that I was proving. So I ended up giving them a full report, and they're like, "Man, this looks like the direction we should go." And so there are other people that are investing in that kind of thing. So we're actually trying to work out an investment deal with them to build out, like, a whole underlying financial protocol to allow, like, global-level trading using the chain. And so to say that it's just Calvin is unfair, but it would be wrong to say that Calvin is not the most significant person that's put money into BSV.

1:33:01Vlad CosteaYeah. So what would you say that BSV can do that BCH cannot? Like, what is the technical difference, other than the block size, which is kind of obvious, that you guys went for gigabyte blocks?

1:33:14Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think, so it's, you know, everybody likes to focus on the block size, because it's an easy number to notice. But what I think is actually more significant is the fact that there are a lot of opcodes in Bitcoin that got turned off in 2010 and were never turned back on again. And at this point, I think all but two have been turned back on in BSV. And then the limits of those different, like, the script limits and stuff, have been, like, eliminated. Like, a lot of them are, you can only have, I think in BTC it's like 256 kilobytes in the stack or something at a time. In BSV, it's arbitrary.

1:33:55If you want to try to push a two-gigabyte script in a single transaction, like, by all means, give it a shot. Then the node will process it if it's a valid script. And so it allows you to do things like just using, I'm gonna lose my, what is the damn opcode called? nLockTime, nLockTime, I think it's called. So you can open a channel that works quite a bit like a Lightning Network channel, except that it lives in Bitcoin script. It's in the stack on Bitcoin. And so you can open a payment channel between two people, you can transact sats between it, and then you can close it with another transaction. Like, no quote-unquote L2 necessary, but just because the script is there, and it's an original Bitcoin script. And it can allow you to lock a certain amount of sats in a hot wallet up in script, and then transact back and forth at lightning speed, and then close it on either side, you know. So, like, just those kinds of things can be done in just primitive Bitcoin. You don't need all this other, you know, network security risk and, you know, all these other things. And so you can just create that.

1:35:00And really, I mean, anything that you could do in Ethereum or in Monero... There was a guy, his name is Xiaohui, he created a bunch of stuff. Like, he created a bunch of script templates for doing things like ring signatures or zk-SNARKs. And so if somebody wants to just simply implement, like, Zcash-style privacy or Monero-style privacy at the wallet level, you can have it that every transaction generates itself a zk-SNARK and pushes your transaction out, basically simulating Zcash, but just in Bitcoin script. Like, there's not a reason to have the extra stuff tacked on, like Zcash does. And so anything you could want from privacy or payment channels or Ethereum-style smart contracts, you can build in Bitcoin script on BSV. And, you know, I wish more people would come tinker with it, because, like, my team is probably the only team that's doing any significant work. There's a few other independent guys that have built some pretty interesting things, but, you know, the BSV community is a pretty small community still, because, right, you know, the price is down. There's not a lot of opportunity there, because, you know, nobody got rich and whatever. But a talented developer, you know, every time we bring in a guy, or every time I meet a guy at a meetup who's like, "Hey, I'm a full-stack dev, and I heard that this could happen," they typically end up joining a team, because they're like, "Holy crap.

1:36:32This is incredible. Who needs help?" And so I'll connect them to some team that needs a good engineer, you know. Then we remain friends, and they're just like, "Holy crap, if anybody knew all the stuff that you could build in BSV... Like, this is the richest place to be building anything." And these are people that have left Polygon or Ethereum or Solana or, you know, whatever. So it's a, really, if it can be done in crypto, it can be done on BSV. And that's kind of my whole position on it.

1:37:00Vlad CosteaI think the interesting part about it is that this is accomplished with opcodes that Satoshi disabled in 2010. So basically it's nothing new. It's nothing that was created that did not exist previously. It's something that Satoshi gave us, and he disabled it temporarily because he was afraid of DDoS attacks. And now...

1:37:28Kurt Wuckert Jr.That was specifically the block size. So the block size was because of the DDoS risk, but the script stuff was because they just had that bug. And I think Satoshi was really shocked that somebody was able to attack the network. He wasn't sure how or why, you know. Like, he literally just was in the middle of a cyber attack, and then he pushed a patch and told everybody, like, "Hey, we gotta roll this block back." Like, they printed 180, I think it was 184 million bitcoins in a single block, which obviously is impossible. So he kind of coordinated everybody. I think it was...

1:37:57Vlad CosteaActually, billion. Let me look at it. It might have been...

1:38:00Kurt Wuckert Jr.184 billion. Whatever it was, it was an absurd number. But with that patch, he also turned off a bunch of the opcodes, because he looked at it and said, "Okay, they must have done some big formula of script that I don't understand. Like, I have obviously shipped something that has a bug that I don't understand, and I don't know how to fix it. So let's turn these off. We'll sandbox it." And then, like, he basically left the project within the next six months, too. So it was like, the guy that turned them off because [of a] security problem never explained how they should be turned back on. And then it just was left with Gavin and Mike, and then, you know, like, who else? Amir Taaki and a few other people. And then all the people that became Blockstreamers showed up within the next 12 months, and they're all just, "Hey, I don't know.

1:38:47Let's do this and this and this and this." And so whatever Satoshi's vision was, he turned it off and then flaked out. And, you know, we've all just been left to guess, really, until BSV, which is the part that I have found the most interesting. Like, let's turn them back on. Let's see what we can build with this, because he gave us an invention, then turned off 80% of it. Nobody ever tinkered with it. Like, what happens if we tinker with it?

1:39:13Vlad CosteaWell, something worth considering is that version 0.1 of Bitcoin QT, it wasn't even called Core yet, had a broken game of poker and a marketplace, a marketplace with reputation systems, sort of like eBay. I think eBay was very big at the time, and Satoshi wanted us to have, like, an actual use case for it, not just internet money that we are gonna figure out, like, whatever we want to use it for. He wanted to build some use cases into the client, which, of course, this is not the best way to do it.

1:39:51Like, you can build businesses without actually putting them in the code. It's not elegant.

1:39:57Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, you don't want it in the node software. But yeah.

1:40:00Vlad CosteaBut that was pretty cool, and he sort of showed us the way. He was like, okay. Ironically, the first big use case was the Silk Road, which was a marketplace. So that's what people should be using internet money for. Now it's mostly speculation, but yeah. So Satoshi did want us to have more advanced smart contracting and locking, and I guess escrowing, and everything else that you do on eBay, and maybe also for playing poker. There are some more advanced contracts that you can create.

1:40:38Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, and other people did like SatoshiDice was a significant user of the chain and I think it was 2014 and 15. I think they were generating more transactions than anybody. It was just people playing simple casino games and you know, that was another thing that just got killed off by core devs. So it's, I don't know, just a giant shame. Like when you think of all the things that Bitcoin could have been doing today for the world and then the fact that basically almost nobody knows that any of that was happening or that it is even possible today.

1:41:11Like that's my big mission. Like I really just want people to know, hey, this could be done on Bitcoin. It can't be done on BTC anymore because it just doesn't work. But over here, we've restored as close as humanly possible to what Satoshi Nakamoto actually invented. So if you think Satoshi is interesting or if you ever thought Bitcoin was interesting, take a look at BSV. It's the most Bitcoin version of Bitcoin that's left today. And you know, it's an open public network. Like come build something cool and let's see where it goes.

1:41:44Vlad CosteaWell, yeah, but the BCH people also have some of the opcodes. Like they did a full restoration. They also did like a complete migration to Schnorr signatures. So I'm not sure if the opcodes, like there is an actual difference in terms of enabling the opcodes. They were slower. So I got to give BSV credit for trying it first. But BCH has the large numbers.

1:42:09Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah. No, they've done and actually like I think the BCH developers genuinely care about the stuff too. But I think they're just a lot less clear on the why. Like I really like their CashTokens protocol, for example. But using the CashTokens protocol requires an opcode that they invented that allows it to happen. And so like that's just one example of Bitcoin Cash adding to Bitcoin. Like there is a consensus level. A piece of script put in there that makes it that they can do all of this other stuff on this specific type of token protocol.

1:42:47And like, while it's cool, I understand why, like, oh, let's just subsidize this one part of the network in order to make tokens easy. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that introduces the other issue. Like it's a governance problem first, but it's also like, you don't know what downstream impacts that has on other things. And so for me, I'm a big believer in like, okay, just start with the fundamental design and can you build from the fundamental design? And Bitcoin Cash doesn't have that ethos.

1:43:18Like they're a lot more open to like, well, you know, it's essentially our project now. So let's come up with a novel way to solve, you know, for the direction that we want to go. It's similar with their block size limit. They call it ABLA. It is the adaptable block size. What is it called? I don't know. It's an acronym that allows their block size to double every 365 days. And like, sure, that's an idea. But it's also like engineering for a solution that really could just be a node operator, right?

1:43:50Like if all of a sudden there's a lot of traffic on Bitcoin Cash, like you can just arbitrarily raise the limit to your node, right? Like that's just a one line code change for an operator. And so I've always just kind of thought like, you know, if you keep things very simple and very general purpose, like that solves the problem. But like on their side, they're like, no, no, no, we need to engineer an algorithm that's always calculating a thing that's deciding what our block size limit should be because, you know, whatever else and it's like, okay, and like you want to build the perfect robot and I get that, like that is its own fun thing to do.

1:44:26But like an honest node is a node that's operated by an honest person. I think an honest person should be an active operator of their node, in my opinion. Otherwise, I mean, computers aren't honest or dishonest. They just, they do what they're told to do. So I think when Satoshi talks about honesty, I think he's talking about the operator. An honest node commits proof of work and builds blocks and validates, you know, that the transactions that come in are valid and that kind of thing. And so they like to solve problems that include, hey, we're going to invent some new way to solve a problem that includes changing the protocol, which isn't in and of itself a terrible idea.

1:45:05But my concern with it, because now we've seen that there's 20,000 plus blockchains, is that if you get two groups of people who disagree on how to make that change, it's going to turn into another civil war. You're going to have more brain drain. You're going to have whatever else. And they have had that. Like Amaury Séchet got kicked out of the project. And, you know, like Bitcoin Cash hasn't been the same chain for, I don't even think Bitcoin Cash has been the same group of people building on the same blockchain for even like a three year consistent period.

1:45:36Like it literally is like a changing of the guard every two or three years because they continue to have that sort of, we have the chips process and people can make proposals and then we're going to fight about the proposals and then it's going to turn into a civil war and then we're going to kick people out again. And like, it just, for me, it's a governance problem that we've also seen in BTC, like BIP 110 showed like, no, you cannot have an argument that doesn't turn into some kind of a contentious split.

1:46:03But that changes if all of the things that we think are consensus level rules were changed to just network policy rules. And that's truly, I think the most important thing about BSV is like, we don't have a hard block size limit. We don't have a hard script limit. We don't have a hard limit on all kinds of things. It's up to like my company, Gorilla Pool, has completely unique policy settings for our pool. And so lots of people, they come to us and they're like, hey, can I send you a 350 megabyte individual transaction?

1:46:35And, you know, to me, it's like, hell yeah, what is it? You know, it's like, if it's not like illegal pornography or something like, sure, like here's an ingestion point, like send it to our node. Let's mine the damn thing. Let's set a world record again. Like, that's awesome. And you don't have the ability to do that on any other chain. You just check the docs. What did the developers tell me I'm allowed to do on this network? And that's my limit. That's the big difference.

1:46:58Vlad CosteaI did see recently that someone put the entire Monero code base on BSV.

1:47:07Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, and that's I mean, think about how important that is from a persistence standpoint, right? Like, I don't think the Monero people would have thought of us as allies, but we have a database that can accept really, really contentious software and host it forever. And nobody can take it down. And we allow Monero to have the censorship resistance that they can't get in any other way. And that's the way that we want to cooperate.

1:47:36Vlad CosteaBut I do have to ask you, because I have this very nice graph that was made by someone named Lars or something on Twitter. OK. And it has like the complete history of forks that happened across all Bitcoin versions. So it also has XCC, BCH, BSV, even Bitcoin Gold, but that one was not so prominent. So in 2021, there was this hard fork in November for BSV that's called Blacklist Manager for UTXO freezing features. And there was also the Digital Asset Recovery hard fork that is able to confiscate UTXOs.

1:48:21Like, why do you think this is necessary in Bitcoin at all?

1:48:26Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think the Coldcard example is a really good example. So here's the thing. I don't particularly like Digital Asset Recovery conceptually. And the reason is it's a governance risk, right? Like immediately, this is why Satoshi Nakamoto created the alert key. And it was immediately something that people are like, should anybody be able to put nodes into safe mode or to send network wide, whatever? And like you look at that and understanding why like the network again, this was 2010, there was just a huge cyber attack on the network.

1:49:07And Satoshi came at it really practically and was like, OK, instead of having to go to GitHub or Reddit or whatever to coordinate people to roll their node back, like, why shouldn't I be able to send a message to node operators over the network that they should be operating? And like, that's reasonable. But the problem is that the alert key ended up going through the hands of a handful of people. I think the last holder was actually Mark Karpelès before the core devs finally turned it off.

1:49:35And so you create a thing that is a really good idea in a lot of ways, but has with it some kind of weird tail risk if it ends up in the hands of the wrong people. And I think that exact same risk exists with DAR. I think digital asset recovery as an idea, sure, makes a lot of sense. If somebody steals your coin, like the Coldcard case is a really perfect example, right? Like people should be able to very trivially prove this was my Coldcard wallet.

1:50:09These are my UTXOs going into the hacker's wallet and they're still sitting there. And technically right now, if you could coordinate all the BTC node operators, if you could get all of them in a room and say, OK, we know they were stolen, we know it was malicious, and we can prove unequivocally that this was the previous holder of that coin, the nodes could be made to agree to give those coins back to the proper holders. It's just a coordination problem. And so when I think about the good version of DAR, I look at that and say, OK, if I was in that situation, I lost 50 BTC due to either the incompetence or perhaps the malice of the people at the Coldcard company, and I can prove they're mine without a shadow of a doubt, there's not a reason why I shouldn't get those coins back because the immutability of Bitcoin is mostly a meme.

1:51:07If nodes agree to any state of the network, that's the state of the network. And so nodes could be coordinated to give this money back. CZ actually did the same thing when Binance got hacked. I think he lost about 8,000 Bitcoin? Immediately. He posted... He threw together some group chat. If he demanded

1:51:23Vlad CosteaThat this could happen, possibly because he wanted to signal to his Chinese mining friends that maybe he's going to get help, but it never happened. Because he decided that this is immutable. And if you're going to cave to some sort of request, like coming from CZ or Mark Karpelès or whatever, you're creating a precedent which diminishes the value of the coin. Because what's the ultimate, like, why does it even make sense anymore to mine it, to secure it when you have the nation state and the court of law, which is going to decide which transactions are going to stay and which ones are going to get confiscated?

1:52:04Kurt Wuckert Jr.I actually think, and I understand that, but here's the thing. If you had like China or Russia, like, you know, who has a lot of hash power, I think the US probably has about 40% of global hash power now, right? And so, but even then, if you look at it and say, okay, now we've got to deal with malicious state actors. The problem is that you still have to coordinate them. And like, so when DAR came out as a thing, like the BSVA pushed it out.

1:52:29And they're like, okay, here's network access rules and here's digital asset recovery. Here's how it works. You know, I like the idea of actually being able to blacklist a coin or for my pool. This is actually what Luke Dashjr says, like, I want to filter out stuff I don't like. I don't want to mine stuff that I don't care about or things that I explicitly hate. And as a pool operator, I look at that and say, cool, like, I don't want to mine North Korean Bitcoin transactions, right?

1:52:53And so I like that part of it. And then admittedly, I had to send this to my general counsel at my company. I said, hey, you know what? What is our legal obligation here if we receive an order? And it's literally, you know, somebody doesn't just have a key that like moves coins. It's a whole process, actually. The digital asset recovery process has like, it's like a seven day long block period from when the request is put in, it has to be digitized. And then all the nodes have to then communicate and agree that, you know, that they agree that that's the thing that should be done.

1:53:29And then there is a point at which it becomes like, sort of a locked transaction and there's like another week before it actually gets reassigned. And so what that period does is it makes it that everybody can have the opportunity to make sure that the document that they've been served digitally is valid in their jurisdiction. So for me, like it's a Florida corporation. Gorilla Pool is a Florida LLC. And so in the opinion of our general counsel, if we don't receive a court order that's been domiciled into the state of Florida, we literally can't.

1:54:01It would be theft for us to agree with their order. And so we have the ability to essentially vote no, and we signal that to the network. Like we will not be participating in a network where those coins are reassigned. And so it's like, you know, people act like it's a, nah, it's just a stroke of a pen and BSVA is going to steal your coins or something. And like, it's not the case. And then the way the contract's actually written to BSVA, like if they make the decision in a way that's malicious, or if they make the wrong decision based on incompetence, like they have a whole bunch of problems.

1:54:35Like they lose the ability to ever, like not only does the transaction not go through, but they lose the ability to attempt to do one again. So it's like the contract is written really, really strongly in that it keeps people in, like the really risky thing to ever do. Not to mention the cost of getting court orders domiciled to all of the nodes on the network and like all the rest of it. Like frankly, the way it's designed, I don't think it will ever happen or ever be used.

1:55:06And so, and that was actually my attorney's opinion too. He looked at it and was like, the threshold on this thing is so high. Like I don't think they could ever figure out how to get you a court order that you'd have to listen, that you would have to obey. And so if we get there, let me know. But otherwise, like this just seems like a bunch of hot air basically.

1:55:29Vlad CosteaWell, but if you look at the white paper, right, he says in the abstract, and by he I mean Satoshi, he says that the only way... Actually, I'm not going to interpret it. Let me read it as such and then we can talk about what this means. So it says, we propose a solution to the double spending problem using peer-to-peer network, using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.

1:56:03This is the thing, he says, cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. And if you introduce this political layer where you can decide that you can take away funds, you're not really redoing the proof-of-work.

1:56:21Kurt Wuckert Jr.Correct. And this is what I don't like about DAR. So I mean, I understand why it's there. And it's the same with the alert key. Like I didn't like the alert key fundamentally because it adds a bunch of risk. Like it allows Satoshi Nakamoto to put your node into safe mode during a quote-unquote emergency. And it's like, you know, what does anybody do with emergency powers? You know, it's the same reason I don't like the, you know, the, what would it be, the Patriot Act or whatever in the United States.

1:56:50You know, it's like, sure, if somebody is trying to bring a bomb through an airport, like I would like somebody to stop him, but I also don't want to have everybody on earth lose their liberties because it might happen. And so, you know, I look at Satoshi and say, okay, Satoshi wrote the white paper and Satoshi put out the alert key. And like, is that pragmatic? Like it might be pragmatic. You can argue that it's reasonable and you can also argue that it's a lot of added extra risk.

1:57:17And I don't like the extra risk, but I understand the pragmatism. And I feel the exact same way about DAR. Like DAR adds risk that I don't like. Some malicious psychopath uses it as a weapon against the network. And like that is, it's a non-zero risk, but it's also like Satoshi kind of set the precedent of doing the same thing. Like he's coordinated rollback. And in fact, even in 2013, like the next time there was a network-wide major problem, like Pieter Wuille basically coordinated a network-wide hard fork rollback of the chain because of the Berkeley DB incompatibility split that got created.

1:57:56And it's like, yes, it was sort of centrally organized and that's not the way it was supposed to work. And the chain with the longer proof of work should be the valid chain, but it was invalid for all these other reasons. So they had to make a pragmatic, but centrally planned decision to go with the chain that had lesser proof of work and was therefore shorter, but it was more like the real Bitcoin. And then they're like, hey, I hope we never have to do that again, but we made the decision and we're moving forward with it.

1:58:23This new chain here is Bitcoin. And there's a patch that has to be run in your node. If you try to run a 2012 node on the modern Bitcoin Core chain, it won't sync up unless you patch it to understand, yeah, you don't follow the longest proof of work at this point forward. You just have to switch and then you're good. And so it leads to the point where, yes, Bitcoin should be immutable, but in an emergency, you hope the right people are in a position to make the emergency play out in such a way that it's not catastrophic.

1:58:57But there will always be people that have inordinate power, either just by social status, like maybe you're just Pieter Wuille and nobody knows what to do. And if he says, you know what, we're doing this. And kudos to him. That's a hard position to be in too. I wouldn't have wanted to be Peter on that day. But Peter was literally calling miners. I remember, I think it was the biggest miner in the world at the time was at the airport with his kids. And he's like, I can't reset my node right now.

1:59:22I'm not even home. And he's like, well, I need you to. And he left and went home and reset his node and basically rolled back Bitcoin to make sure that Bitcoin persisted. And that's just real life. We unfortunately will compromise sometimes and we will have to compromise again. And again, hopefully the people that have to make those compromises are doing it for the best intentions of the network. So I don't know. I just kind of see it as it is what it is.

1:59:51Vlad CosteaWell, sure. But that was like four years into the Bitcoin experiment and it was much younger and less professional in some ways. We didn't have advanced frontier AI models to be able to verify the code and find bugs. And I guess the deployment of forks was a bit more reckless in some ways. I mean, Mike Hearn is responsible for that one. I guess he's like the recurring theme in our interview. But I think the major difference is that. Nobody had their funds seized. Maybe that some transactions were rolled back because they were mined in blocks that were declared invalid, but everyone got their coins back and they could resume what they were doing. So it's not like it caused a major inconvenience on behalf of the economic actors. But if you have something in place like digital asset recovery, or DAR, what you call it, and it can lead to a situation where a majority of the hashrate can decide to take away funds from someone, I don't think that's a good design.

2:00:56Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think that's a mischaracterization of it. And that was my initial response to it, too, as I'm like, man, I'm not doing that.

2:01:04But then, you know, if you actually read, like it came out with essentially a constitution that they call the Network Access Rules or NAR, another acronym. And it literally, the process by which somebody would prove that it was their coins are stolen, again, I think is so high a threshold. Like, I really don't think it'll ever happen. And if somebody does do it maliciously, the way the rules are written, like they're fined, they're held personally reliable. If it's the BSVA that does it wrong, like they're held institutionally reliable or liable to the problem.

2:01:41So it's like, you know, who's going to risk it? And at what point? And it's also publicly obvious if somebody's like, yeah, you see those, you see those, like, maybe it's the hacker's coins, right? The hacker that stole the Coldcard coins. If they look at them and say, you know what, I'm going to take those coins and I'm going to give them to, I'm going to give them to some charitable foundation that I like. Well, that's not, you don't have the ability to do that. And if you push that, like, again, personally liable, organizationally liable and the whole thing.

2:02:08And like, what judge is going to approve that to, like to go through that, to pay for the attorneys and then the domiciling of the orders to make this all, like it's actually an absurd level of work that would need to be done to do it. So I again, I look at it and say the risk is like so close to approaching zero that like it literally would only make sense in a situation like this Coldcard situation where you have probably a couple thousand people that can prove that their coins were stolen.

2:02:41Vlad CosteaYes, but the question is prove to whom? That's the thing, like, to whom are they going to prove?

2:02:48Kurt Wuckert Jr.I mean, you prove it to a judge in your jurisdiction and then you would get it domiciled to where the nodes that mine are, which is the U.S., what is that, the U.S., probably Russia and, you know, wherever else you send court orders and say, hey, as of this block, those coins that are in the stolen wallet go back to the rightful owner and the rightful owner has put their new address into the court order.

2:03:10It's ingested digitally and the people who've been robbed get their money back. And it would still be a process. I mean, the process would probably take a year or more to do because it's a legal process. But it's not going to be done by, you know, some pencil pusher sitting at a desk somewhere. Like it's a serious problem. It would be the same thing as trying to get your money back if you found out you'd had somebody rob you through your company through some kind of money laundering scheme.

2:03:34Like you'd have to hire forensic accountants, you'd have to have a case, you'd have to have it attested to, it would have to be determined that what happened happened and then there would be an enforcement order. These are not simple, casual things, you know, or one guy with a pen that's just going to make this stuff happen. So it just, you know, again, I don't think personally it'll ever be used. Like there's no scenario I can think of where it would be worth even pursuing. So I just, I see it as such an outside thing.

2:04:05In which case, like, I understand why they put it there. They want to make it that, hey, if we're pursuing JP Morgan or somebody to say, hey, like, why don't you do, like, why don't you do some big multi-billion dollar project over here? And when the question comes up, like, hey, if somebody accidentally burns their private keys at our company, can we get our coin? Like what happens then? I can't just, oh, well, you're screwed. Like it's Bitcoin. Isn't that cool? Like if the response can be, okay, if you can prove they're your coins, you can do this and that, and you have your notary and then you go through a forensic audit and you get the court order and all this stuff, like, yes, you can get your coins back.

2:04:40Like it's not, it's not the end of the world. Like it allows you to say, hey, there are, you know, are some protections against either you being stupid or making a mistake or some massive hack, which we know is a non-zero chance itself. In fact, it's quite a bit more likely than, you know, a bunch of other things. But

2:05:02Vlad CosteaI can describe a situation where I'm going to do some blockchain analysis with ChatGPT or whatever, and I'm going to look for coins that haven't moved in years. And I'm going to assume that some of the owners might be dead or they lost their coins. And then I go to a court of law with some forgeries and I pretend that I used to have access to these coins, but I don't anymore. For some reason, something happened and my computer got destroyed or something. I lost my hard drive.

2:05:32And then I'm going to pretend that they're mine and I'm going to build a big case out of it. I'm going to create a story where I tell people that this is what happened and I'm going to tell them where I was when I was mining the coins, what kind of computer I was using, all sorts of stories. I'm going to get witnesses, which are going to say, well, he was into computers. I can tell you that. And possibly he could have been into Bitcoin. I don't know, but it looks like the kind of guy who would be interested in this.

2:06:00And then you're going to get a situation where unless somebody claims the coins during the time of the trial and can provably cryptographically sign with the private keys to show that they don't belong to this person. And even in that situation, maybe the person can say, well, yeah, maybe I didn't mine those, but I mined the other ones, which nobody claimed. And then it's going to be catastrophic for the entire network when me or the person who decides to file the lawsuit is going to get a favorable decision from the judge.

2:06:33And then the mining pools are going to be in a situation where maybe that they realize that this is bullshit, but there is no way to appeal because nobody was able to claim these coins. And there is actually a built in network level protocol that allows anyone, not anyone, but that allows miners to confiscate funds on the basis of a court of law that decrees that that should be the case. So someone is going to be able to appropriate something that does not belong to him based on this process.

2:07:06And just because it hasn't happened, it doesn't mean that it cannot happen. I've actually seen this kind of news with someone who claims that some lost Bitcoin belonged to him. And if he goes to a court of law and nobody claims it, of course, he's not going to get the BTC. But it sets a precedent for exchanges. It sets a precedent for the OFAC list, which blacklists some addresses, which means that if the rightful owner ever comes back and is like, OK, I'm going to move some of this to Coinbase or something, they're going to get flagged as potentially hackers.

2:07:42They're going to have to KYC themselves. And then there's a court order that says, well, these coins actually belong to John, who filed the lawsuit and was able to prove that these belong to him. And it is going to be a very messy kind of situation. What I'm trying to say is that at the human politics level, there are lots of abuses that you can make, especially with courts of law, which are antiquated in some ways and not prepared for this kind of situation. They deal with land, they deal with something tangible, but the digital world is not their realm.

2:08:15They don't get it. And they're going to be abused and dragged into something which they don't understand. They're going to make a bad decision, which also creates a precedent for future court cases which are similar. And then we're basically going to destroy these beautiful Internet money networks with the nation state judiciary branch.

2:08:39Kurt Wuckert Jr.Well, I can think of, you know, the theoretical person that you're describing there. I think we do have an example of somebody that tried very hard with a lot of money to prove that he was Satoshi and that he lost his coins. And court looked at him and said, nope, definitely not. And, you know, and that's I think reinforces my point. But then we also have this, is it the Noah Doe case? I can't remember what the company is called. It was an old financial asset recovery firm that disappeared like 10 years ago and then came back about a year ago to start putting in OP_RETURN messages on BTC saying, oh, these abandoned coins are my coins.

2:09:20And then a bunch of people started moving their coins. I can't remember what the firm is called. But, you know, there is precedent in law for that kind of thing. Like, hey, this is abandoned property. I want to claim the abandoned property here. And it's an interesting game in, you know, legal theory going back for, shoot, 1500 years or whatever in like British common law and to see how hard that stuff applies. But it's a curiosity. But, you know, like I think that really does reinforce my point that the guy who had the biggest game and the most money and the best possible story about, hey, here's why I'm Satoshi Nakamoto and lost access to my coins.

2:10:05Like, court said no. Coins ain't moving. And like that was the thing that everybody said was going to happen. Like, ah, this whole BSV thing is just so that one guy can just have coins on that network that everybody agrees are his because they're a cult. And like, nope, the laws of the system say that you have to pass the laws of the world. And the laws of the world said, nope, not you. And that's it. And to this day, there's not an argument to be made there.

2:10:36And so I get it. You're not wrong. And I agree with you that that risk is there. It is a non-zero chance. But I think it is infinitesimally close to zero that somebody is able to just rip somebody off based on the way that it's structured. I think it's structured really, really well to enforce actual property rights. That if you are the actual victim of something that violates your property rights, you can probably get them back. But if you're some kind of lying scammer or whatever, good luck.

2:11:09Go spend millions of dollars to try to get those coins. And if you can't pass the muster, you're not getting them. And I think, I guess my point is that if the guy who attempted to get his coins on BSV couldn't get his coins on BSV, who's got more leverage in BSV than the guy that everybody thinks of as Satoshi, right? And so it just goes to show that it doesn't matter how strong your cult is. If your proof isn't proof, that's the whole conversation. That's the system as it was designed, working exactly the way that the people who designed it said that it would work.

2:11:48So that's my thought on it.

2:11:52Vlad CosteaYeah. So speaking of proof, what do you think about Craig Wright? Do you still believe he's Satoshi?

2:11:59Kurt Wuckert Jr.I do, actually. Maybe I'll be the last guy on earth that thinks he's Satoshi. And it's partially, I think there are big parts of the story that he is being dishonest about. And I don't know if it's, is he just a liar? Is he a crazy person? Is he protecting somebody or whatever? But there's just, there's too many things out there. And admittedly, I should state ahead of time, I have interviewed probably 15 people. In fact, shoot, it's at least 15 people now, because they're producing a documentary and all this stuff that I have consulted on.

2:12:38I'm also under NDA, specifically with Craig on parts of the story. And so I have interviewed his family members. I have interviewed his work colleagues. I've interviewed people over the years who are all like, I know Craig is Satoshi. I was with him working on this piece of it, or I worked on this little piece of it, or all these things. I interviewed two people that worked with Dave Kleiman, who was his partner and his editor of white papers during that era. So Craig put out a paper with Dave Kleiman in 2008 called the Drive Wipe Fallacy white paper.

2:13:14And even just the formatting, you read that damn paper and you're like, this sounds like Satoshi Nakamoto. And here's the thing is Craig doesn't sound like Satoshi Nakamoto. Craig with Dave as an editor sounds exactly like Satoshi Nakamoto. And it's interesting because they've published a couple of books and a number of white papers together. And when you read something that Craig wrote, but Dave edited, it comes back as very, very Satoshi. And then you can even talk, like you mentioned the poker client in the Bitcoin code.

2:13:46And like, I don't think it's irrelevant that Craig was working with Centrebet and Lasseter's casino during the era when Satoshi Nakamoto was coding up Bitcoin. And what Craig was working on was working on like how to get weird payments into casinos for the sake of offshore gambling during that era. And then Bitcoin ships with a poker client bundled into it. And then he quietly takes it out of the code. So it's like, there's stuff like that. And there's other stuff that I just frankly can't say about it.

2:14:20That to me really drive the point home, but it's not my place to say, but there's so many of those things, including like the people that he'd worked with that are like, no, he was always talking about like this timestamp money, like a time coin thing. And like, these are people that have no reason to, in fact, they have told me like, do not use my name. I do not want to get dragged into the story. Like I have seen what happens to people, but like, here's, here's me and Craig working on this thing.

2:14:50Like, look at where the software project went. And then he's like, Hey, let me use that. I got, I have a thing I'm working on over here that I think it's going to change the world, but you know, I get, you know, and whatever. And then you look at it and you're like, okay, that's another Bitcoin primitive thing right there. And like, he brought some of those people into some of his trials, which I've sat through. I've sat through all of his trials. I sat through every day of court.

2:15:11I've read all the evidence. And like, he brought a couple of strong witnesses, but frankly, some of the witnesses that he picked, I'm like, why the hell did you pick that guy when you could have picked this guy who I have talked to? And I've seen his proof. Like, what are you doing? You know, but anyways, the long and short of it is I think the story is more complicated than Craig wants. Like Craig has a big ego and Craig wants it to be. I'm solely Satoshi.

2:15:37I did this all by myself and all this stuff. My research on it says, yes, Craig was like, it was probably his idea the way I see it, but the implementation of things. I think was probably a serious team of about five people. And then another four or five people that had some significant work that they put into it too. And like, I've just, I have talked to too many people who know too many things that they couldn't know if that wasn't the case. And again, none of them want to be public.

2:16:09Like all of them have shown me the evidence. They've explained it to me. They've walked me through the stuff and they're like, and for the love of God, if you ever say my name in public, like I'm going to, I'm going to sue you to death. Like I do not want to get dragged into the Bitcoin story. And like, I just have nothing else to do with it, but say like, yeah, I do. I think, I think Craig writes Satoshi Nakamoto for within an order of magnitude.

2:16:31Like I think his, I think his Satoshi story is roughly the truth.

2:16:36Vlad CosteaRight. But the people who did like a writing analysis and they tried to find patterns in the writings of Satoshi, they found out that it's actually 90 something percent close to Nick Szabo's writing because there's an obsession with removing trusted third parties, which Nick Szabo has been writing since the nineties. And also if you look at the code, you're going to see that the style and everything is antiquated and also sort of old school, like from someone who might have learned how to type on a typewriter.

2:17:10It's very, very 1990s style. There are also some patterns concerning consistency, right? So it doesn't look like it might've been more than one person because there's a kind of consistency in writing and in style and also in coding, which gives you the impression that it was most likely someone working around the clock on a very well established and committed schedule to be able to deliver. This piece of software. And I think that we should not, we live in the time when verification of software is cheaper than ever.

2:17:49You can just take the code base of Bitcoin 0.1 and ask Claude Fable. What's the name of it? Fable 5, or Kimi K3. Ask them, well, what do you think about this? Does it look like this? Just ask away some questions that you want to ask basically if you want to find Satoshi. And on my end, I've interviewed people, for example, Martti Malmi, and he told me that it was definitely not Craig Wright, but it was not some sort of NSA agent either because he interacted with him a few times and Satoshi was struggling to set up WordPress.

2:18:30So that's the kind of situation where you realize that this guy is not quite a professional. He's figuring out things as he goes and he has his own human flaws. He does believe that it's only one person. And also I've interviewed the guy who runs the Metzdowd cryptography mailing list, Perry Metzger. And he also told me that he never got the impression that it's Craig Wright. And these are all people who have been there in the early days. I'm not talking about those who came along and listened to Craig Wright's story.

2:19:07It's just people who are there. I'm sure that other guys like Ray Dillinger and Hal Finney, of course, he's not alive anymore, but Ray could be a good source. And Szabo, he was there since day one and he wrote the first blog post about Bitcoin. And actually, Szabo, I think he's a pretty good candidate for Satoshi. The only reason why he doesn't seem to have made it because in the 90s, he was obsessed with decentralizing e-cash. He was working for David Chaum and he was going up to him being like, why don't you build this in a decentralized way? Right?

2:19:42Kurt Wuckert Jr.No, for sure. So I've written about this quite a bit. I've streamed about it too. So about, I don't know, four or five months ago, I decided, you know what, I've been so immersed in this for so long, I'm going to try to relook at the whole story with fresh eyes. So I started the History of Bitcoin podcast and a written series and I'm like, you know what, I've assumed it was Craig for a long time here and then I've learned a lot since then. But what if I try to separate myself from the conversation and just look at the evidence for what it is?

2:20:13And so I actually did exactly that. I went through the code. My first two whole episodes and articles were about who did he cite? Why would Satoshi have cited the people that he cited? And then let's look at the code. Why would he have used the database style? Because everything about the code is actually very weird. Just everything about it points to, okay, this is a very peculiar person to have built this thing. He's not a professional C++ coder.

2:20:39Vlad CosteaThat's why it's not Adam Back. Because Adam Back is a better coder than that.

2:20:45Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yep. Well, it's also, you know, even like somebody like Szabo, like I looked into Szabo and I just I think he falls apart pretty quick. And one of the things is that Szabo was like an Ethereum guy. Like he thought Ethereum was really cool because of its, you know, Turing completeness and smart contract. Like he thought that was very novel. And like, I've seen him interviewed early. It was probably 2015, 2016 where he was like unaware of the Bitcoin script stack. And like some of the stuff that was in Bitcoin, he was like, oh, OK, you know, I didn't know that.

2:21:17Like that kind of thing. And it's like, OK, maybe that's him being humble or pretending he doesn't know or whatever. But like he really just seems to genuinely have learned about Bitcoin when he learned about Bitcoin in public. Right. Which is totally fine. I don't like or dislike Nick. I actually quite like Nick on a lot of things. But, you know, same with like people bring up Hal Finney or they bring up Len Sassaman is another one that gets brought up as like, oh, what about him?

2:21:43He's this Belgian guy. And there's a Belgian mathematician is cited in the Bitcoin white paper. So, you know, I followed that lead. Like that's a really weird guy to cite. So there's a weird citation from a guy that runs like the math department at some I think it's the University of Brussels or something. And, you know, so I dug in. I sent him a message. I'm like, hey, what do you think about having been cited here in the white paper? He didn't get back to me. You know, and I'm like, come on, man.

2:22:08Get back to me. I want to know your thoughts. But like, you know, I look at it and say, okay, it strikes me as one really obsessive, like, you know, ADHD, OCD kind of guy who is really obsessive about building it quietly and building it basically himself. But even so, like when you look at the way that Satoshi, like Satoshi in writing actually contradicts himself a number of times. Right. Like he talks about, you know, some of the things that he cares about. And like, you know, over here, he's very libertarian.

2:22:38And then over here, he's he's really not, you know, and like that kind of thing. And so I think

2:22:42Vlad CosteaHe was also kind of a pussy, right? Because when WikiLeaks started accepting Bitcoin, he got...

2:22:47Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah.

2:22:48Vlad CosteaHe was bitchy about it.

2:22:49Kurt Wuckert Jr.Like, oh, you're going to bring the feds on us, and, you know, all this kind of thing, right?

2:22:53Vlad CosteaThe hornets are coming.

2:22:55Kurt Wuckert Jr.Right. But at the same time, he was also the guy talking about, hey, Bitcoin could be used for like, you know, drop some tokens in an adult site and keep your privacy and this kind of thing. So it's like he's talking...

2:23:05Vlad CosteaYeah, that's actually a topic called "Porn on BitcoinTalk." It's quite funny.

2:23:10Kurt Wuckert Jr.And like, you know, so it's like I look at that and say, OK, at the very least, I think he had like an editor or somebody that was working with him. Right. So I think it's probably two guys minimum. The way that that I think that it played out is when I look at Dave Kleiman. And again, I've I've read tons like if you read Dave Kleiman, that's what Satoshi Nakamoto sounds like. So, I mean, the Dave Dave, like you just you kind of can't get past like interesting.

2:23:38He's he's thoughtful. He's very libertarian. He's very, you know, decentralized networks and personal privacy. He was a cybersecurity guy himself. And then he has this assistant. He's got a Vietnamese assistant whose name was Uyen Nguyen. And like I've also talked to you know, I've attempted to talk to her and she also won't talk to me, but she's another one that really wants to get left out of the story. But like when you look at their relationship and how she has testified on her part of the Bitcoin story in that.

2:24:10Yeah, I helped generate key slices and all this stuff to like save the Satoshi coins and all that. I'm like, I got screwed out of it. And so it's like she tells her story as, like, this scorned, like, "Leave me out of it. I tried to help Satoshi Nakamoto and he's an asshole. And then I finally meet the guy. And yes, he's genuinely an asshole. And screw you Satoshi Nakamoto and screw you Bitcoin. And then you get the same kind of story out of somebody like Joseph Vaughn Perling.

2:24:37Like JVP talks about it like, oh, yeah, no, it's I had this relationship with Satoshi. And like we came up with this idea to keep the key slices like this and this and that. But then Satoshi is an asshole. And then I end up meeting him and like, yes, he's an asshole. And then like and this is all before people knew who Craig was as a public person. And then they're all like, yeah, yeah, that's the asshole. I can't get over the fact that like there's so many people that are there and they corroborate Craig's story.

2:25:08But tell it literally as like adversarial with Craig. They're like, yeah, no, this is like Craig is Satoshi. I know he's Satoshi because I helped him with this and I did this and this for him. And he screwed me and he's a prick about it. And he thinks I owe him money, but he owes me money. And it's just like this whole thing, it just comes across as very authentic. Like these people don't have a reason to lie that Craig was Satoshi and that their participation in these things was, you know, was what it was.

2:25:35But there's also the issue, like when I watched the Kleiman trial, you know, Dave died in 2013 and he died suddenly and his business partners, which they were a cyber forensics firm, his business partners got into his house and they took a bunch of his hard drives and flash drives and stuff. Like Dave, the story goes that Dave kept a thumb drive on his key chain that never left him. And it was always like, this is the most important thing in the world. And somehow his business partners got it before the police and all this other stuff.

2:26:06And those hard drives and thumb drives and all this stuff were never submitted to court because we lost them. And it's like, well, how did you get them in the first place? So there's like, there's stuff like that where there's like this incentive for people to lie and cover it up and probably disappeared with some Bitcoin. And like, I just, I can't, I can't square all of that and say, like, it's definitely not Craig. Like, again, I think Craig is not telling the whole story. I think there's a whole bunch of stuff we don't know.

2:26:34And it's either, again, he's protecting somebody or he's just dishonest. But, but I just, I cannot accept that it's nothing, that he just made this up and decided to, you know, become the most hated man in Bitcoin. Because it's obvious, like this is the hardest possible path to scamming. And like, what is the scam? You know, like he could have showed up and been like, Hey, I was on the cypherpunk mailing list. There's, here's a, here's me arguing with Julian Assange in the nineties and here's me doing this and that.

2:27:00Like I'll come, like, let me be the, let me be a co-founder in your ICO. I'll walk away with a hundred million dollars and everyone will forget I exist. Like that's actually what David Chaum and Dan Larimer and a bunch of these other guys have done. They're like, Oh, I was a cypherpunk, like write my name on something, write me a hundred million dollar check and like, peace out. Like, so if Craig was just lying or just a scammer, just wanted like notoriety or money, like he could have done all of those things.

2:27:27But instead, like his story looks the way it looks. And to me, it's like either he's completely insane, which I'm not writing off as impossible. But he's either completely insane or he's basically telling the truth about a really, really complicated screwed up story. And so that's, that's where I fall on it.

2:27:46Vlad CosteaOkay. I think the main issue here is that we look too much at stories and we don't look at actual data that we have. There is this log that we have from Hal Finney's node that was also saved in Dustin Trammell's client. So these two guys were the first Bitcoin miners. Maybe it was Hal who first joined the network after Satoshi. Maybe it was Dustin. It's still debated. But what we have is their clients and we know for a fact that they connected to Satoshi's node and Satoshi's node consisted of two IP addresses.

2:28:20One of them was on Tor and the other one was on...

2:28:24Kurt Wuckert Jr.California, if I recall, right?

2:28:26Vlad CosteaNo, it was in California, in Van Nuys. Van Nuys, I'm not sure how you pronounce that.

2:28:35Kurt Wuckert Jr.Nuys. I think it's "Nice." Yeah.

2:28:37Vlad CosteaSo the question is, why would there be a Bitcoin miner in Van Nuys in California, which was like two hours away from Hal Finney's house? And where was Craig Wright around that time? Like if I interviewed him, I would ask him, what were you doing on that date? Where were you? Did you have any server running there?

2:28:58Kurt Wuckert Jr.So Craig would have been, so that would have been 2009, Craig almost certainly would have been in Australia. But Craig was also running global operations for various companies. Like I don't know exactly when, but he was running servers for companies like Vodafone, which Vodafone was doing all the like cellular network stuff for the Asian Pacific region. So it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that they had a node in California that maybe wasn't being used or it was used for backup. There's also Dave. So if Dave Kleiman was Craig's partner, Dave was a Floridian.

2:29:36I actually live in the same county that Dave Kleiman lived in. But Dave was a traveling cyber forensics expert. And so Dave would take high ticket stuff and do cyber forensics for big court cases. And there are a lot of big court cases in California because that's where Silicon Valley is. And so if you need a forensic accountant who is not closely associated with the people in California, it wouldn't be unreasonable. Like Dave would be one of the people on the short list to have a footprint in California for the sake of doing cyber forensics work.

2:30:11Now, both of those are totally theoretical for me. I have no idea that that's what they were doing. There's also it's not. Yeah, I mean, it's not exactly difficult to spin up an IP address basically anywhere if you want to. So I don't think that necessarily points to anything in particular, but it's interesting. I mean, it's something I've looked into, too. Like, I don't know what to make of that IP address in California. I am fairly certain Hal Finney was not, like... So actually, I take that back.

2:30:41Hal Finney did get code before Bitcoin was released. So I think there is an argument to be made that Hal deserves at least some credit as being a pre-release editor of Bitcoin, where you can make the argument that like maybe he deserves some credit to be called like part of the Satoshi team. Right. But I don't think I don't think Bitcoin was Hal's brainchild. Like some people just are like, no, Hal was Satoshi. I don't think that's the case. But it's yeah, I mean, that IP address was not particularly far away from Hal.

2:31:11But also, I don't I don't think it's I don't think it was Hal playing a game. I don't think that IP address was Hal.

2:31:17Vlad CosteaThere's definitely something there. Like Hal had a neighbor whose name was Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. And then there was the first non-Satoshi miner. No, the first Satoshi mining node, which was based in California in Van Nuys. Like there's something there that was like two hours away from Hal's house. Yeah. So something happened around the time and it was in California. And I do believe that philosophically and possibly also in other ways, Bitcoin is kind of an American project. Sure. Like it follows the aspirations of a community of cypherpunks that were based in the US and were established in the US.

2:32:05It uses cryptography from the country that sort of made it legal after the battles of Phil Zimmermann with PGP. Yep. And it just follows an American tradition for the world. And the way that you look at money, because in the US, I think before the central bank was established, it was Thomas Jefferson, who was a big fan of not having an official currency and just letting people accept as money whatever it is that they want, be it gold or silver or some foreign money, foreign currency. He would not be in favor of having like a centralized central bank.

2:32:46That was Alexander Hamilton. Yep. So Bitcoin is pretty much American in lots of ways. I don't see how this could exist or come out in any other country of this world where we are much more centralized than thinking. America is like this libertarian experiment. Sure.

2:33:06Kurt Wuckert Jr.I would tend to agree. My only pushback is that those early Americans who were very libertarian were British separatists. And there is a long time underlying tradition. I think Adam Smith was Scottish, for example. And you get libertarians like the Austrian economy. They're Germanic Austrians, for example, but...

2:33:31Vlad CosteaYeah, but they had to go to Chicago to be taken seriously.

2:33:36Kurt Wuckert Jr.No, I understand. I'm born and raised in Chicago. I live in Florida now, but no, I know that history.

2:33:41Vlad CosteaLike, nobody in Austria cares about them. That's the funny part.

2:33:45Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, right. There's like a hundred people on the internet that know or care. But I think it's relevant that everything from the actual Robin Hood story, for example, or those kind of things, there is an underlying libertarian British Commonwealth current. And actually, a lot of that current ended up in Australia as well. Now, Australia is a super liberal, super cucked part of the world in a lot of ways. But that's the people you've heard of from Australia. If you don't live directly in the city in Australia, they are extremely libertarian.

2:34:27And that's the environment Craig grew up in. Craig grew up in a rural, outside kind of family that was at church three days a week and living on like, hey, we got to go pump the well to get our water kind of place. And those kinds of places are very separatist. They're very anti-power. And so, Craig is not entirely out of the... And actually, if you talk to him, if you want to talk politics and economics with Craig, he'll go all day on the importance of sound money and not having...

2:35:06He'll go into it for the deep philosophical reasons, not even the Bitcoin reasons, but he's a deep libertarian activist at heart too. So, I mean, he doesn't have a philosophical separation from that. So, not that that necessarily proves anything, but he doesn't disagree with that general school of thought.

2:35:28Vlad CosteaFor context and continuity of our conversation, I have to say that Hodlonaut has replied. And he called me, I'm not going to say it because I might get banned from YouTube or something, but an FN idiot. And he also retweeted and said, this is exhibit 837 on the absolute decay of culture and principles in the Bitcoin space. Vlad goes live with Craig's main propagandist on his podcast, part of his research. And he typed research like with a capital letter and a small case letter, capital small case, like he's mocking me.

2:36:03But he blocked me like I can't reply to this. I'm sorry. I wish I would. I wish he actually listened to the first part. I know for him, like going through three hour interviews might be a little too much. That's why we did that very early on. And I want to maybe look at this from a different point of view. And let's assume that I agree with you. And I do agree that Craig Wright is Satoshi because I'm compelled by your arguments. So this guy is unquestionably the guy who created Bitcoin, right?

2:36:42Why would the guy who created Bitcoin and I'm just trying to use my deduction after I agree with something and I come to terms that something is true. I do have to look at the subsequent course of actions and try to deduct the logic behind it. So why would someone who gave us this invention under the MIT license, he open sourced it, he made it available for everyone else around the world. And then he went for basically the maintainers of the project that he left behind. And he sued a bunch of open source developers and also filed patents like once you release something out there in the wild.

2:37:22And it's your baby. And it's something that you obviously care about because Satoshi mentioned working on this for at least a couple of years in one of the emails. Why would he go after it and first of all, try to file patents so that others cannot build on top of his technology? And secondly, sue the people who are using this technology once again, they were continuing his work.

2:37:48Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think you and I both agree that Satoshi was wrong about a bunch of his presumptions about Bitcoin. Satoshi was an idealist. He saw it as so obvious what it was for him, what it should do. And then if people did what it should do, that what it could do is inevitable. Like it's going to change the world. And he was wrong. We know Satoshi was wrong. Instead of Bitcoin being used for all the stuff that it could or should be used, people took the good ideas, they mutated them on BTC, they took the ideas and did all kinds of other things.

2:38:23And we have actually mostly failed to disrupt anything. I like to think about, okay, how many people have lost their job because Bitcoin has disrupted them? And it's probably very, very, very few people, if any. And so I think in the context of looking at it and saying, you know what, my presumptions that it was obvious and that it was obviously a good idea and that I could trust people to understand that it was a good idea and take it in a direction that creates real value for people.

2:38:51All those presumptions were wrong. And so if I invented something that I thought was crystal clear and I wanted it to be used, I imagine somebody like Oppenheimer, right? Like, hey, nuclear energy. Think about all the great things he could do. And then he really regretted building the bomb, right? And I think it's totally plausible that if Satoshi watched the way that, you know, we know he hated WikiLeaks, for example, right? Like he looked at it and said, ah, don't do WikiLeaks. And then it's ended up for the first six or seven years used almost exclusively for black market crime, right?

2:39:26Well, that would have upset him. And then look at everything that's become. Now it's become this weird, like it's become almost nothing but a weird financial vehicle for Larry Fink and Michael Saylor and these people, right? So it's like a failure on both fronts. Like the payments that I cared about didn't happen. The payments that it did focus on were terrible. And then it's been turned into a financial asset upon which people are just leveraging tether and stock derivatives and all this other crap. And like I could see saying like, you know what, I think I need to take another swing at this.

2:39:59I think the people that took it over did it maliciously and the people that control core are bad. And it would be like if I can't fix it, then it was just a bad idea. And I could see him taking a really big swing for the fences to do whatever it takes to fix it. Because he cares. I mean, he obviously cared about the idea. And I could see somebody who really cares about their idea, seeing it get bastardized again and again and again, maybe even losing their mental capacity over it.

2:40:29And saying like, I don't know, I guess I got to, I either got to fix it or I got to burn it to the ground. And I think that's what that looked like. So I think it's a pretty reasonable presumption for how Satoshi might come back into the picture given what happened with all of it.

2:40:47Vlad CosteaRight. But what about the lawsuits? Like, it's very uncharacteristic for someone who spends so much time and so much effort trying to remain anonymous on the Internet and just live under this nim with the purchase of the Bitcoin.org domain, which was made possibly with Liberty dollar notes or something to not get any banking information. And also, all the steps that were followed. OK, let's say that he came out in 2015 and he said that he did it. But why would he file lawsuits against the developers as opposed to trying to compete with a better idea on the market or just proving that he's Satoshi and trying to politically take the development of the project in another way?

2:41:36Because so far we can both agree on this. He hasn't cryptographically proved that he's Satoshi. Yeah.

2:41:43Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah. I mean, I think he did. Like, when I think back to 2016 and 17, like, I remember Craig's speech when I first actually really got like I read when he came out in Wired and Gizmodo, the whole Craig doxing and all of that. I found it interesting, but I wasn't immediately compelled. I was like, he does look like Satoshi. Like, this is interesting, but I didn't give it a ton of thought. But it was in 2017 when I saw him speaking at Arnhem, the Scaling Bitcoin Conference, about six months before the split of Bitcoin Cash.

2:42:15And like, Craig's in front of all the developers. Like, it was basically everybody. Everybody was there. And he's explaining Bitcoin is supposed to be everything. Here's what it can do. Like, he's going into all of these novel explanations of all these things. Like, he's petitioning them. He's saying, hey, build this with me. Like, here's nChain. Like, we're going to invest all this money. We're going to do all these things. Like, this is me putting my cards on the table. I'm going to put my work into it, my money into it.

2:42:40I've got, you know, Jon Matonis is on my team. And like, I hired some serious cypherpunks to work at our firm and a bunch of this other stuff. Right. And like, he did appeal to them. Like, there are pictures of him. Shoot, I remember Jameson Lopp was on. It was either right before or right after Craig. And he was like, wow, man, I don't know if he's Satoshi. But if we have to, like, we should let his ideas be the thing that inspire us. Whether he is or isn't.

2:43:06Like, Jameson was up there being super like, man, that was interesting. That was compelling, you know. And there's also a picture of him trying to, of Craig trying to get a picture with Luke Dashjr, and Luke's like pulling his hat over his head, and apparently he didn't want the photo with Craig. But like, Craig was at these things. Like, Craig was trying to ingratiate himself to the people that were in charge of these things. And he was attempting to work with them. And it was very clear in that era that they had no, like, A, they didn't want to hear the big blocker discussion about anything.

2:43:37And then B, the fact that he's saying, well, I'm like, yeah, I got docs that I'm Satoshi Nakamoto also didn't help his cause. But I think it's very clear that he spent a good two solid years trying to say, hey, like, let's do this together. Like, nChain is designed to scale Bitcoin. Like, let's make this incredible. And he was just very roundly rejected. And then it turned into public shaming. You know, so it turned into the entire community is just going to spend, you know, a pretty good amount of time calling him a scammer, calling him a fraud, and calling him a psycho, and calling him a fool, and all the rest of it.

2:44:14You know, and it's like the whole lawsuit thing. Like, that really started to come around like 2019, 2020. And that was his response to, hey, guys, can I come help? I'm really good at all. Like, here's my resume and here's all my stuff and whatever. And them just saying, ah, it's like, we don't like you. We don't like your ideas. We don't like your backstory. We don't like anything about you. We don't have anything to do with you. You're not a Bitcoiner. And then we got angry Craig.

2:44:41And so I think, again, I still think that if we're just going to assume that he's Satoshi, like all of that seems like a reasonable chain of events to have happened.

2:44:53Vlad CosteaWell, I still think that Satoshi would just prove that he's Satoshi, first of all, cryptographically, and then try to push ideas before attempting to go to a court of law. I think that's like the last resort that anyone can use. And it's also very uncharacteristic for someone who was struggling so much in the first year of the Bitcoin network's existence to get any traction, to get people to care about this. He actually had to launch it twice. The first time was when he announced it on the cryptography mailing list.

2:45:29The second time was on the peer to peer foundation forum. And the second launch was a bit more successful. In the first couple of months, I think the network halted more than a dozen times, specifically because Satoshi was the only miner and he designed the system where he was always waiting for someone to mine alongside him. And the other guys who were joining the network possibly saw no value in just leaving their computers on all the time. And it was causing fan noise and whatever. So it's very difficult for me to understand the psychology of someone who spent so much time and effort in bootstrapping this network, only to try to destroy the people working on it afterwards, and not just destroy them like prove that they suck or whatever.

2:46:18As developers and fight their ideas, he tried to destroy their living, went after them, tried to dox people like Wladimir van der Laan who is very private. I met him in person one time. Very nice guy. He's a true Dutch. Very honest. But on the other hand, he doesn't like even taking a picture of him or whatever. Of course, when you see someone famous, you're like, oh, can I get a picture of you? And he's like, "No, please."

2:46:45Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, I don't blame him.

2:46:46Vlad CosteaYeah. I get it. I think there was only one voice recording of him from MIT at some point when Gavin went to do a presentation with the digital currency group and he was in there via live call or something.

2:47:02So that was possibly the only way that anyone could identify him. And to be honest, he put so many years of his life into this. You can argue that he was not based enough or courageous to just go all in and be like, let's do the block size increase. He didn't try to politically exert his opinions and was more like, you guys decide what we should do and I'll just make it happen. That was his approach to it. But why would Craig sue someone like him? Like, he didn't do any harm to the network.

2:47:37He's not a criminal. He didn't try to destroy Bitcoin in any way. Like, I understand why he would go after Peter Todd, right? Peter Todd is more outspoken. He has stronger opinions. He pushed RBF, which the big blockers don't like. He's willing to put up a fight. Peter Todd actually likes fighting. But why go after Wladimir? Why go after... OK, maybe Greg Maxwell is not a great example because he's also very opinionated. But he's also not very involved physically. Like, he doesn't go to any events. He rarely participates in conversations anymore.

2:48:15He calls himself retired if you go to his website. Yeah,

2:48:20Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think, I mean, just, you know, again, I'm not like a like I do think Craig is Satoshi, but I want to be very clear. I'm not I'm not just a Craig apologist. Right. And like, but I've followed Craig for a long time. And I think it's like it's a villain arc. Like, we've we've seen this, you know, where you can look at somebody who was an idealist and they thought something was very clear and they're very passionate about it. And it just keeps getting pissed on and pissed on and pissed on.

2:48:53And like, you know, Craig is also like I've spent personal time with Craig to like Craig is also very mentally different. Like he's a very neurodivergent person. Like, I don't know if it's Asperger's or, you know, like anybody can try to diagnose him, but I don't think it's any one thing either. But you can tell that the way that his brain works socially and under stress is not like like me. Like, I'm I basically never lose my cool. Right. Like, it's very, very hard to make me upset.

2:49:26But somebody like Craig, just in casual conversation, like you can see him like he starts to grind his teeth if he doesn't like what's being said and then he can't help and interrupt. And then he'll interrupt with something weird, you know, and it's like so like we're talking about somebody that is not he's not like you and me. Right. And so like I can't expect him to behave the way that I would behave under a certain circumstance. Like to me, like it's like, look, they don't like me.

2:49:54They push me out. They want to do something else with the thing. I don't have any power. Like I just I would move on. I would like to just go get another job. Right. But he's a different kind of person. And so like, does it does it make sense? Like, I don't know. I don't I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that he just wants to go scorched earth. Like we've seen how many people became dictators after they weren't taken seriously because they wanted to go to art school, for example, you know, and it's like.

2:50:22These people exist. Like I wanted to be a painter. Instead, I had to blow up two thirds of Europe, right? And like, that's, that is just a, that's a decision that some people make. And it's a, it's a nasty decision to make. But it's also, it's a human decision to make. Like if you let your, let your vision and your emotions guide all your decision making, then anybody who's in the way is just cannon fodder. And at some point, like that was the decision that Craig made about it.

2:50:51And, you know, I think in a lot of cases, you know, like you mentioned Wladimir van der Laan, I don't, I don't know him. I don't, I don't know what he's like, you know, but it's like, you're on the wrong team, bro. And I think, you know, he got collected into, well, he's a major contributor of code to Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Core is fundamentally taken over by, you know, whatever. It was Epstein money that was paying for MIT and it was MIT that was paying Wladimir van der Laan. And so I'm like, he must be the bad guy.

2:51:20Right. And it's like. You know, I don't want anybody to get hurt here. And like, that was a big thing for me too. Like watching Pieter Wuille at the COPA trial, for example, like super soft spoken Belgian guy. Like, you know, he's not like, is he a villain? Like, I don't know if Pieter Wuille is a villain. He doesn't look like one, but he was a Blockstream co-founder and he was, he was along for the ride. And it's, it's the same kind of thing.

2:51:45Right. Like I get, I get criticized for being an American based on, you know, whatever Trump does or Biden does or Bush does or Obama does. Right. And it's like, I don't know, like, is all that my fault too? Like, China would say so, and screw them. Like just like all Americans are Americans. Like they're just the enemy. Right. And so, and I, again, I don't want to justify it. I, but I do think it's, it's a response that is not unexpected given certain circumstances.

2:52:14And, and I do think, like, cause I remember the era, I remember 2017 and 2018. I remember the era like Craig and nChain and all the rest of it, like they were pumped. They were so excited about Bitcoin and they were crushed. They even actually about the Bitcoin Cash fork too, you know, like Craig didn't want Bitcoin Cash to be a separate chain. So like that was its whole own thing. So then when BSV split too, it was like a double whammy for him. For me, I didn't care that much when Bitcoin Cash split.

2:52:45I was like, well, I guess that sucks, but you know, at least we have a network that's not going to be, you know, controlled by these people. These core people anymore. But, but, you know, I look at that and I say, you know what, they went from hopeful idealist builders with a business plan and turned into holy crap. Like why are we having a civil war from three directions now over Bitcoin? We just want to, we just want to make cool stuff. Like we're a tech company.

2:53:13And now all of a sudden we're like this weird, like litigation firm and, you know, getting into all these weird Bitcoin politics and all the rest of it. And I really think that it all just kind of, it all just happened. Like, like a lot of things happen, like the same reason a painter doesn't get let into, you know, get let into art school and then ends up again, like killing, you know, 15 million people across the continent of Europe as a consequence, you know? And like, I think sometimes things just run away and you can't claw them back and you can't just apologize and have it be okay anymore.

2:53:50And frankly, that just is basically what happened.

2:53:56Vlad CosteaWell, it's weird to me that you acknowledge or not just acknowledge, you are aware that this guy might be a villain in this story, but you still support him. But regardless, I'm not here to judge you personally. I'm just here to talk ideas. Your previous argument about why Nick Szabo is not a good Satoshi contender is that he was not aware in 2015 when he was on a panel with Craig Wright at the Las Vegas conference, he was not aware that Bitcoin can be Turing complete. I mean, Nick Szabo did not know this.

2:54:34And he basically said to Craig, "Right, I'll read your paper when it comes out," or something like that. Yeah, that actually happened. You can find that on YouTube. But there's also the situation with Roger Ver, who spent a lot of time with Craig Wright and had a conversation one time about Bitcoin signatures. And it seemed like Craig Wright was unaware that there's a checksum in every Bitcoin address. And at that point, Roger concluded that there's no way that Craig Wright can be Satoshi. And he sued him.

2:55:06And he actually won in a court of law before any of the COPA trials or whatever. This was like two or three years before. And why would the creator of Bitcoin not know that there are checksums in every Bitcoin address?

2:55:26Kurt Wuckert Jr.Rather than discuss it as it being a Craig thing, the only source for that information is Roger. And I've seen Craig give presentations about checksums in Bitcoin that preceded that conversation. Craig used to give weekly presentations at nChain and he would stream them, where he would talk about Bitcoin primitives. And here's when we moved from raw pay-to-public-key to pay-to-public-key-hash. And the pay-to-public-key-hash is derived from the pay-to-public-key address. So I've seen him lecture on checksums and hashing and all these things in Bitcoin.

2:56:12And so immediately when Roger... I watched him say that when that interview came out live, that that was the reason he realized Craig was full of crap. And just immediately I'm like, I know Craig knows about checksums in Bitcoin. So I think Roger was being dishonest. I think at that time, because it was also... So in the month leading up to the split between Bitcoin Cash and BSV, Roger was a ghost. And Roger was never a ghost. Roger was on Twitter every day and posting videos all the time.

2:56:46And as soon as it became obvious that there was going to be a hash war, all of a sudden Roger disappeared. And he disappeared until about, I don't know, three or four days before the actual split happened. Then all of a sudden Roger comes out with a video. And in the video, he's explaining this, the checksum thing. And then I can't remember now if it was right before or right after. I think it was right after Roger came and read an email that Craig had sent him that basically like, Roger, you know I'm Satoshi and I've told you that I will prove it to you.

2:57:19You told me that you didn't want the proof. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a very angry email from Craig to Roger. And I don't know. Roger, for whatever reason, didn't want to be involved in cooling down the conversations between the SV people and the cash people. Which I think he could have actually. I think if Roger would have publicly been the guy to show up and be like, Hey guys, can we cool the temperature down a little bit here? We're arguing about a bunch of really lame technical stuff, but we're all big blockers and we all really care about Bitcoin.

2:57:52I think he could have squashed it, but he didn't. He disappeared. I don't know if he disappeared because he wasn't sure or if he disappeared because somebody wanted him to disappear or whatever. I don't think anybody had any puppet strings to pull on Roger at the time. But the fact that Roger showed up right before the split to then say, Nope, I know Craig isn't Satoshi because of this random conversation I had where he didn't know that there was a checksum in the thing. It just seemed like a convenient story to me.

2:58:23And Roger is the only source for it. And like I said, I have seen Craig give lectures on things like that. It's exactly the kind of thing that Craig would often give a presentation on to explain Bitcoin concepts. So I tend to think that that's just Roger coming up with a convenient reason why Craig is the bad guy.

2:58:46Vlad CosteaOkay, so being able to prove that you're Satoshi comes in different ways. The most evident one is just signing the Genesis block, which is something that Charlie Lee was able to do for Litecoin. Another way would be to, man, this is more dubious, right? Because it can be forged. You can hack into these accounts, but bring back the satoshi@gmx.com email address.

2:59:13Kurt Wuckert Jr.Sure. Or private conversations that only Satoshi could have had.

2:59:17Vlad CosteaBring back the BitcoinTalk forum account. Come back. I think the account on the peer-to-peer foundation was hacked, actually, and I think his PGP key might have been compromised also. So these are...

2:59:31Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, a bunch of this stuff was hacked in 2014.

2:59:34Vlad CosteaThese are not reliable metrics anymore. But of all of these, I'm not aware of any of them that Craig Wright was able to do, at least publicly. I know that there was that signing ceremony that was private and Gavin Andresen was, he flew to London to participate to this. And then I think the latest statement that he made, or not the latest, but the most conclusive is that he got bamboozled, and this is his word. And he no longer believes that what he saw was real. There was also a testimony that I got from Thomas Voegtlin, the creator of Electrum, and he said that he looked at the download logs from around that time.

3:00:25Nobody downloaded that thing.

3:00:27Kurt Wuckert Jr.I recall that. Yep. So I watched this in the Kleiman trial. Gavin gave sworn testimony for that trial. So I watched him, where he explained it. And he said the same thing. He was like, it was a gobbledygook, whatever. I didn't like the laptop situation. And so we decided to buy a second laptop. So they went to some London technology, like Circuit City or Best Buy kind of place. So they got a second laptop, and Gavin opened the laptop, and he set it up, and then they set up Electrum, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

3:01:05They walked through it again. So they apparently did it on two laptops. So that's his sworn testimony. And I can't change the fact that when I saw him do it and they walked through it, that I looked at it under oath and watched him explain it and was like, okay, this is him saying, yeah, the guy showed me on two laptops. Now, I know he said the bamboozled part of it in his blog post, I don't know, two years later or something. But that was under an era of a ton of pressure.

3:01:41That was more coming up to the COPA trial and a bunch of this stuff, and people are pressuring him. And I think what he actually said is he really just wants to be left out of the conversation at this point. And you look at it and say, maybe, I don't know. I also know a number of other people that have said, oh no, he signed for me and this and that. Like, remember, like there are people like nChain, for example, was a multimillion dollar investment by other people that were trusting Craig.

3:02:12And as I understand it, like they had their own forensic people who weren't just gonna invest a bunch of money based on some wacky Australian guy's story. And so there's a lot of that kind of thing, but I think also, like when I think about, you know, and I'm lucky, I've never lost Bitcoin keys. Like I've never, I have never mishandled my Bitcoin keys and lost my Bitcoin. But there are a lot of people I know who mishandled or, you know, in some way lost the ability to access their private key.

3:02:47And so I don't think that that necessarily is an indication that, you know, like, well, Satoshi wouldn't lose his private keys, right? Like that's the presumption there. And, you know, again, like that's the convenient story for Craig. Like I had the hard drive and I stomped it or, you know, like we've heard a bunch of versions of why he can't sign or why he won't sign. And again, like this leads to me saying like, I still think Craig is Satoshi and I think he's being dishonest about something.

3:03:17Like there is a big chunk of the story that admittedly does not make any sense, right? But it's also like, it could be as simple as he screwed up. He reformatted his hard drive. He lost his thumb drive, you know, whatever, right? Like these things do happen too. That doesn't necessarily negate the fact that he could be Satoshi Nakamoto, but it also would be like, that's the proof everybody wants to see, right? So like the fact that he absolutely can't or absolutely will not, or essentially the same thing at this point, but you know, like, do I wish he would just sign if he had the damn keys?

3:03:53Like, yes, it seems to me that would be the easy way out at this point if he could, but, you know, I don't know what to do with it.

3:04:03Vlad CosteaWell, he can just send me a Bitcoin from one of the Satoshi addresses and I'll be very much convinced and I'll be like...

3:04:09Kurt Wuckert Jr.Me too. I would accept that as proof.

3:04:11Vlad CosteaI'm simultaneously in awe because I have like a public proof and I also get paid for it. So I can get like conflicting feedback, right? Like, oh, you received one Bitcoin, that's what you admit. But no, it's on public record. You can find it on the blockchain. Like that'd be a very cool story arc. But let me ask you something else. Like a big part of the trial against him was the fact that he tends to forge stuff. We decided, like you said that he has like a very neurodivergent personality and he's like a wacky character if you ask me with the dances and the sword play and whatever it is that he does.

3:04:50It seems like he has lots of weird interests. But he also posted pictures of Lamborghini for example and pretended that it's his but there was like a note on, what's this called? The windshield that this is a rental. Like he has these weird moments where you're like, why would anyone do this? And it was also the case with some addresses that he pretended to be his. Just like you have people under NDA or something that you cannot mention or whatever. I cannot name the guy but I met him in person and he told me last year that one of the addresses that Craig Wright listed as one of his actually belonged to him and he mined that Bitcoin back in 2010.

3:05:43And the reason why he did not step up was that he knew that Craig was gonna lose the trial and he didn't think it's worth it to dox himself. So there are stories on the other side of the spectrum that claim that Craig lies a lot. Do you agree that he lies or how do you reconcile with the fact that he tends to bend the truth in his favor all the time?

3:06:11Kurt Wuckert Jr.I think, I mean when you look at that kind of thing, right? It's like he was living in, I forget the block in London but it's like the richest neighborhood in the city and this kind of thing, right? He was living really big. But was the house rented? I think so. And then was it actually owned by nChain or something? Yeah, maybe, probably. I don't know, I don't have inside information on that but you deduct the logic and that would make sense. But then you also look at some of the things that I've seen from, actually I probably shouldn't tell this story but the Bitcoin that passively will be observed in the presence of Craig, it's not insignificant or that kind of thing.

3:07:00But when you look at the guy, so going back to talking about, he's from rural Australia, right? He had an abusive father. Like he ended up being taken away from that home and raised by his grandfather because his father was so physically abusive, alcoholic kind of thing. And he's also neurodivergent. So you're taking a neurodivergent abuse victim who then decides to move to London and start wearing like hand tailored three piece suits, right? Because he's from the kind of place where he probably had one shirt and one pair of shorts for like his whole life growing up.

3:07:34And so he's a very poor kid who ended up being this guy that works at a hoity-toity place in like highfalutin part of London and whatever. And then his life starts collapsing around him. So it's like one of these stories where like, yes, he's clearly being dishonest about a whole bunch of things. I think parts of the Satoshi story, but also the flexing, right? Like he's walking around. I remember seeing him on a stream with a Bitcoin Cash guy and he holds up his watch and he's like, you see this thing is a $20,000 Hublot watch.

3:08:13This is a special edition. This kind of thing, right? And it's like, that's the behavior of somebody who grew up poor and is now rich, but has imposter syndrome about his life, right? And I think part of it is the fact that everybody's accusing him of being a liar. And so then for him, he's trying to build the case like, no, no, no, no, this is what I think Satoshi would look. Satoshi would look like a rich guy. And like, again, I just think it's the mental thing, right?

3:08:44I know people like this. I grew up, I'm from the hood. I'm from a very poor part of Chicago and I've become pretty successful. And like with some people who I meet from my childhood, I'm like, you know what, I'm just gonna wear a t-shirt. I'm not gonna wear my watch. I'm gonna, I'll take an Uber, that kind of thing. But then with other people, it felt like if I'm going to meet investors or whatever, like I don't wanna look poor, right? And so it's like, I think everybody, excuse me, everybody has a little bit of an imposter syndrome.

3:09:14And I think Craig doesn't have the scruples to understand when he looks like he's being absurd, right? Like, and it's everything. It's the handmade Italian shoes. It's the handmade London suit and just all the rest of it. And like, he's playing a character the way that he thinks he should play the character given the situation. But even now, like he posts to Twitter now and he's just like, same thing. He's like working a dirt farm in Thailand or Vietnam. He's somewhere in Southeast Asia.

3:09:41Vlad CosteaOh yeah, he's growing pumpkins, just like the crazy lady, right?

3:09:46Kurt Wuckert Jr.You're right. He's got this crazy, like, well, he held up this ridiculous cucumber. It's like an overgrown, it's probably a two foot long cucumber. He's growing out there and he's like working with his hands and he got in a motorcycle accident. He was showing like his broken ribs and all this stuff. And it's like, you know, so now he's living that life and now he's this weird expat living in rural Southeast Asia. And like, that's the character he's playing now, right? And I think when you're one of these people who is neurodivergent and has this history of abuse, and then you've been abused in your professional career too because nobody likes you, like you're not sure who you're supposed to be.

3:10:21And frankly, you know, I don't know how to deal with that kind of thing. I'm sure there's a good therapist somewhere that could maybe help him work through some of his issues, but the guy's clearly got some issues and given, you know, just given the way he behaves and what we know he's been through, plus who knows whatever else he's been through. Because I know he also, I looked into this because he claimed like, oh yeah, I used to be adjacent to. I can't remember if it was British or Australian special forces.

3:10:47He was doing some kind of like work hunting for like human traffickers in South America, like that kind of thing. And I'm like, man, that there is no way that story is true. And I dug into it. He's got a, he's got a record and he's done like sort of paramilitary work as part of his history. You know, it's like, so he's just like done a lot of really crazy things in his life. And even now, like the fact that he needs to get like 50 post graduate degrees, right.

3:11:16And like people argue that they're fake and it's like, okay, even if 50% of them are fake, the other 50% are like, you know, this is a high level, this is a master's degree in math and a master's degree in statistics and a PhD in theology and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, it's just a guy that functions in a very different plane of existence than people can handle. So he's just a, he's a weird character. I don't expect anybody to relate with him.

3:11:43I find it hard to relate. I even basically, you know, like the guy, but even when I'm one-on-one with him or when I see him in person occasionally, it's been a few years, but you know, I hang out with him and it's just a little bit like, I imagine it would be like hanging out with somebody who's like, I don't even know, like a Bond villain or something. It's like, I don't know, he likes me. I guess this is interesting, but am I in danger?

3:12:04You know, it's just a, it's a very, it's a very weird thing being in his proximity and seeing like he is not different in private than he is in public. He's very weird in public. And he's, he's a, he's a character in private as well. So it's like, it's, he's not kidding. He's just, his brain is not like normal people's brains. So it just is what it is.

3:12:27Vlad CosteaWell, yeah, I remember after the COPA trial that a bunch of BSV community members started to denounce him and they said that they got fooled and they gave him all the time and all the trust that he's going to prove himself in court to be Satoshi. I think it's what he said in front of the Oxford Union Student Association or something that if someone gets, I don't know exactly what the verb was, but basically

3:12:55Kurt Wuckert Jr.Something about perjury.

3:12:57Vlad CosteaYes. Something about perjury. You should be able to prove in a court of law that you have been wronged. And it's exactly what he tried to do. And he was not able to prove anything in front of the judge. And Ryan X. Charles and a bunch of others decided that it's a good moment to say that they're sorry because they have been fooled. I just checked. You never denounced Craig, right? So you never said that he's not Satoshi or whatever after the COPA trial. But it seems like, so there was a time when it was like the cool thing to do to say, okay, I feel deceived by Craig Wright and I don't trust this man anymore.

3:13:33But then it sort of went back to normal. And it's like a weird phenomenon, right? Where people say, well, I don't like this guy anymore, but then they went back to him. It's very hard for me to wrap my head around it. Like, do you think that there can be a distinction between BSV and Craig Wright? Like, can they exist separately or do you think that BSV is stronger when Craig Wright is like the central figure?

3:14:01Kurt Wuckert Jr.Well, I think, I mean, partially Craig Wright has not been the central figure since he lost. I mean, he basically disappeared after the COPA trial. And I think that's a good thing. And not because I didn't like Craig being part of the community, but mostly that it shows that the people that are still there are there for Bitcoin. And I've said more than once, and I used to say it a lot, I really don't talk about Craig very much. I really only talk about Craig if people ask me about Craig as kind of my rule.

3:14:33Because for me, it's never been about Craig. Like, I wasn't interested in, like, I wanted to be a BCH guy. I liked Bitcoin Cash, you know, and like Craig was a guy that was tangential in Bitcoin Cash. And then he also didn't want BSV to exist as its own chain. And like, so I went with BSV because that was the roadmap of Bitcoin that I cared about. And like, so Craig has always, for me, been tangential to the story. I do think he's Satoshi, but I've said it in public a bunch of times, like, if he's not Satoshi, that also doesn't change my opinion on why the things in BSV have played out the way that they have.

3:15:11Like, the reason for BSV existing is that in 2015, big blockers started saying, hey, there's something really wrong going on with these core people. We think we should restore Satoshi's vision, which I think was a phrase that was used a bunch of times before then. There were Bitcoin Cash conferences called the Satoshi Vision Conference. It's like, people have always been trying to figure out, like, what is Satoshi's vision? Like, we've been debating that question forever. And like, just jumping into it, like if none of the stuff with Craig ever, if Craig never showed up on the scene and the rest of the Bitcoin civil war played out basically the way that it did, and we'd be sitting here on a BSV looking chain because of the way that it played out and no Craig in the context, I would be in that camp anyways.

3:15:57And so whether Craig proves he's Satoshi and everybody celebrates or whether Craig falls off a cliff in Indonesia next week, I'm still just interested in what Bitcoin is capable of. And the only people that are trying to see what just Bitcoin is capable of doing as Bitcoin are the BSV community. And that has always been the thing that I've cared about first and foremost. I've always found the Craig story interesting. I find it compelling. It's a drama. It's like watching daytime TV and watching a drama play out and whatever.

3:16:36I'm not immune to the like, man, this is spicy, juicy, is he, isn't he? That's all fun and games. But ultimately I think it's irrelevant to the Bitcoin story on any version of Bitcoin, like all the forks and whatever, like ultimately in hindsight, I would say, you know what, maybe you should have just kept your mouth shut and focused on building cool stuff on BSV or on Bitcoin Cash or whatever, and not made it, you know, this weird, you know, the parts of the civil war that didn't need to happen because of his bad attitude.

3:17:10And, you know, but in hindsight, you know, whatever hindsight is always 20/20, but either way, like, I'm just not that interested in any of the rest of it. Right. Like if BSV just, you know, goes away, like I'm not going to go pivot and try to be like an influencer on some other chain. Like I just, I will just go do something else with my time. Like I find BSV interesting. I've built businesses in BSV because I want to see the work carried through and I really care about it.

3:17:38And like, I'm not going to become a Bitcoin Cash or I'm not going to go, you know, like I don't want to have a, I don't want to be a guy with a podcast and that's my whole thing. Like I like building cool stuff in the BSV space because I find it interesting personally. And so that's like my whole take on it. Like Craig in some ways has been a massive asset. Like I've actually learned a lot from Craig on a technical standpoint, but then, you know, he's been a huge albatross too.

3:18:04Like he's been a big problem in a lot of other ways where we could be friends with the Binance people or whatever else if it wasn't for, you know, a bunch of the nonsense that played out. And that's just, it is what it is. And I can't control him. I've never claimed to. I'm not even particularly close with him. Like I've always made a point, like I've never had him on my show. I've never, you know, I've never appeared in like a big public appearance and I've been asked to cause they're like, Oh, Kurt, like you're this, you're, you're so good at being on camera and blah, blah, blah.

3:18:33Would you like to, and I'm just like, I just, I don't want to be Craig's avatar or Craig's mouthpiece. Like, you know, he has a PR team. I don't work with them at all. So it's like, I really, I want, I want to keep Craig at arm's length where we're friendly. And in some sense I could call us friends, I guess, but you know, it's, it's, it's never been about Craig. Like it has always been about the Bitcoin experiment for me. And that's why I've always just kind of said like, you know what, if he's going to be the way he's going to be, that's on him.

3:19:02That is his decision. I don't, I don't agree with everything. I think a lot of the things were really, really bad and in some ways malicious, but that's his life. It's his decision to make. And you know, and he's dealing with the consequences. So just is what it is.

3:19:20Vlad CosteaIf there's anything positive that came out of Craig Wright's statements in BTC, it's that some people started looking very much into this idea of making Bitcoin Turing complete. And this whole BitVM idea that was pioneered by Robin Linus and Supertestnet is very much in line with what Craig Wright was claiming that Bitcoin can do. Like these guys basically came out and said, yeah, we can make Bitcoin Turing complete. And that was like a big deal. Still is.

3:19:53Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah.

3:19:56That's a great example. And that's what I mean about like, you know, to just try to eliminate the work that Craig has actually done. Like I encourage people, like read his, read his Substack, read his patents. Like there's a lot of really good stuff in there and there's a lot of, you know, people will say, ah, his patents are gobbledygook or whatever. And it's like, yeah, but if you read it, like this came from 2015 and when he wrote it, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about.

3:20:20Like these things are known now, but it was him teaching that to the ecosystem. And so there's a lot of that kind of thing where Craig actually has tremendous value. And that's why I've never, you know, again, if he can't learn from somebody just because he don't like them, that's your problem.

3:20:40Vlad CosteaI think I sort of forgot to ask you to reveal your number and people have been posting messages in the chat.

3:20:48Kurt Wuckert Jr.So, I'm a Christian and I think the most proof-of-work number that exists in anything is 40. Now 40 is a number for judgment and, but there's always something that comes of it. So it was Israel spent 40 years in the desert wandering as a punishment. Jesus was tempted for 40 days in the desert. There were, you know, 40 days and 40 nights of rain during Noah's flood and all of these things, but it's always, it's always the, can you survive this? Can you survive 40?

3:21:25And if you can survive 40, there's something good on the other end of it. So that's why I chose 40.

3:21:29Vlad CosteaIsn't that how old you are?

3:21:31Kurt Wuckert Jr.I am also 40 years old. Yes.

3:21:36Vlad CosteaIsn't that how many years Moses spent in the desert?

3:21:40Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yes.

3:21:41Vlad CosteaBefore going to the promised land. Anyway, I'm scrolling up to see if there's any 40. In the chat. I can't find it right now.

3:21:50Kurt Wuckert Jr.I definitely saw, I saw some 40s, a couple people posted 40s.

3:21:53Vlad CosteaI saw 41. Anyway, I'm going to take a better look tomorrow when YouTube finishes processing this. If there's anyone who wrote 40 and wants to claim the prize, step forward and I'm going to take a look. Anyway, where was I heading with this? So you said that even if you were in a situation where BSV would not exist, you wouldn't join another cryptocurrency? Like you don't find anything interesting out there in this space?

3:22:25Kurt Wuckert Jr.I mean, not interesting enough to put more work into it. Like I want to see the Bitcoin experiment play out. Like I think there's interesting stuff that happens in like Sui and Solana. Like I think there are people that actually care about scaling and using blockchains in the real world. I just don't care about them. So it's like if BSV is, you know, not a thing anymore at some point, like I, you know, what am I going to go do? You know, join a developer group or something like I do all kinds of other things.

3:22:55So I would just, I'd be, I'd be uninterested. I wouldn't be interested enough to contribute to something in a meaningful way. I would probably stay on Twitter and give my comments occasionally, but I would probably not not care so much after that.

3:23:11Vlad CosteaThat's interesting because I think if Bitcoin went to zero or something, I would focus on Zcash or Monero or stuff like this, which actually fulfills this decentralized e-cash vision because e-cash in David Chaum's design was very private, but also centralized. The point of having decentralized e-cash is to also have privacy. If you read Hal Finney's article from 19... 80 something, or maybe it was the early nineties, I have to double check, but he does mention that we should be wary and cautious about any digital money system that claims to be Ecash but has no privacy.

3:23:57And also think that philosophically as something that's supposed to be sound money, it should be fungible. So if you're able to discriminate, if you're able to implement that measure from BSV where you can confiscate, or seize assets, that sort of diminishes the whole value of the system. It should be something in which you cannot tell if the transaction comes from someone in Russia or someone from the US and be able to truly circumvent the banking system. Whereas I feel like a lot of crypto nowadays is just trying to reinvent banking, but with a different UI and a different narrative.

3:24:42And that's really unfortunate.

3:24:44Kurt Wuckert Jr.That's part of why I wouldn't be interested. I do find Monero interesting. I used to mine Monero. I was a big Monero fan, especially when it looked like Bitcoin was going to be... During the darkest parts of the Bitcoin civil war, I was like, man, Bitcoin is just over. And so I've made friends with the Dash people and some other things too. And then discovered Monero. I started mining Monero. And I liked it. I don't disagree. I also don't think they need my help, I guess is my point.

3:25:15It's like, in what way would I contribute? So if there was something I could do, maybe, but I also don't know that anybody would necessarily want to work with me. People like to think I'm tainted. I get told all the time by the BTC maxi types that my career is over as soon as this BSV thing goes away. I'm, you know, whatever. But I don't know.

3:25:45Vlad CosteaWell, I'm not so sure about that. The Monero people still need a historian. If anything, I think that the history of Monero is really rich and interesting. Where you have this guy, Nicolas van Saberhagen.

3:25:59Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, Saberhagen. Yeah. And I know the story. Monero's cool.

3:26:05Vlad CosteaI know a guy who says he worked with him in an office in Russia. Like, interesting. He's a real guy and they just don't want to talk about him. It's curious. So it's not much different from the whole who's Satoshi story. Except that nobody stepped forward and said, "I'm Nicolas van Saberhagen." That's kind of the major difference.

3:26:32Kurt Wuckert Jr.They need Wired and Gizmodo to do some research and dox him.

3:26:39Vlad CosteaIs there anything that we haven't discussed about BSV or your work?

3:26:47Kurt Wuckert Jr.I mean, I'm doing a bunch of other interesting stuff. So, you know, I work with a team. Our site is opl.dev, stands for Open Protocol Labs. So some of the stuff I was talking about with like Twetch, like things that are related to people being able to communicate privately, have censorship resistant relationships. So they can pay each other, but also just so you can have communication. So we have like a open encrypted communications protocol that we're working on. We have an open social protocol that we've built.

3:27:18It's called Bitcoin Schema. It's probably seven or eight years old at this point. You can read about it at bitcoinschema.org. And that's actually the underlying protocol that Twetch and Treechat and some other things work on. So that's the kind of stuff that we're working on. If anybody's interested in working on like privacy technology as it pertains to a Bitcoin system, especially on like the bit part of Bitcoin, like there's plenty of people focused on tokens and finance and all that. I'm really interested in the bit.

3:27:45And I think that digital sovereignty, you know, a digital ID that you can own and you can burn at will, for example, I think is another really important thing for us to get right. So we have the Sigma Identity protocol at sigmaidentity.com. So we have a bunch of stuff like that that we're working on. Those are the things that I actually care about. And, you know, everybody wants to talk about the controversy, the scaling war and Craig. But like, in reality, I have a bunch of stuff that I'm trying to build with a couple of my good friends that, you know, we want to make the world freer.

3:28:19We want to make it that people can communicate even under extreme pressure. And, you know, monetary sovereignty is really, really important, but so too is your digital sovereignty to communicate, to get information out there, and to have ownership of your digital footprint, your words, your philosophy. And, you know, so those are the things I actually care about. If anybody cares about those things, like those are the other things that I really want to talk about. I care about self-sovereignty and privacy and those things. So otherwise, that's pretty much it.

3:28:52Unless you want to talk about jiu-jitsu because that's my other big passion in life.

3:28:58Vlad CosteaYeah, I'm more into fitness boxing, to be honest, lately. But yeah, I'm trying to lose weight. That's why I do it. Otherwise, I would be into basketball. Something that we actually have in common, and I was like, you know, this guy is not that bad. That was my first eureka moment was when you mentioned the Smashing Pumpkins. And I was like, oh, this guy is cool. He likes the pumpkins. He gets it. Like, I think from 91 until 96, they're untouchable.

3:29:31Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, no, they were huge. I've seen them in concert probably six or seven times. They're one of my favorite bands of all time. They're from Chicago, too. So for me, it was like the hometown show, and they'd come through. And so I've seen them at small clubs, and I've seen them at the United Center, which is like the biggest place in Chicago to see a show. But yeah, it's funny. Arthur Van Pelt was also like a Smashing Pumpkins superfan. So I like to bring that up. When he likes to tell me that, like, I'm evil and we have nothing in common, I'm like, hey, man, we have the Smashing Pumpkins in common.

3:30:03Vlad CosteaI've had Arthur on my show, like, five, six years ago. He does seem like the obsessive kind of person. Like, yeah. Makes me wonder, OK, you want to prove something, but why would you spend so much of your time? And, you know, you're not going to get that back. Like, he obsessed with trying to prove that Craig Wright is a liar. And he spent so much time doing it. I'm not saying that it's not useful. I'm just saying that it's not healthy for him to obsess with anyone to that degree.

3:30:34Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah. I've tried to tell him the same thing. Well, similar to what I've said to you. I'm like, look. OK. I don't think he's telling the truth about a whole bunch of things, but also that's not the important part of the story. I have even, real early on, I tried to feed him some of my information because I was doing research early about Epstein money and Bitcoin Core and this kind of thing. I don't know, 2016, 2017 era. And everyone's like, what does that have to do with anything?

3:31:05And I'm like, no, no, no. Look, I started talking about Joi Ito at MIT. And like mapping the stuff. I've always kind of wanted to be a investigative journalist was something that I sort of thought would be fun. And I started digging into it. And I'm like, man, this network of money is really, really, really dirty. And when he started, he came out as like, hey, I'm going to be this, I'm going to clean up the nasty stuff in Bitcoin. I'm like, hey, look at this. Help me validate some of this many, many, many years ago now.

3:31:33And he was just like, ah, that's all nonsense. And I'm like, bro, no, I've definitely, I did some good research here. Like you should like, but I need some help. I'm just a guy, you know, and wouldn't touch it. And so and then it was all just like, let's focus on Craig. And I'm like, OK, fine. But now all this stuff is pretty well known information in the space. And, you know, it's just like doesn't want to touch it. So I

3:31:58Vlad CosteaThink the whole Epstein situation has really changed the optics and has vindicated some people like some guys were right for so many years, but everyone made fun of them. Right. And it's still somewhat. How should I describe it? Like put under the rug. They're trying to not go there because it's not bullish. I think this is right. We like to talk about the Bitcoin religion as being about purity, but it's actually about whatever makes the number go up. And that's what people are going to accept and say that is true.

3:32:36So if something is not bullish, it's just not going to become part of the mainstream. Yeah. Narrative. Yeah. Unfortunately, we did not let the heads roll in that one, just like we're not letting the heads roll in the Coldcard situation. The guys seem to they just went silent. They released an update to their firmware. And they're like, yeah, well, we'll just wait and see what happens. Like they never really apologized. There is no real accountability. And it sucks. Like, yeah, it's crazy. I'm trying to understand the mental gymnastics of someone who's trying to defend these people.

3:33:15And it's very difficult.

3:33:18Kurt Wuckert Jr.It's just it's about their bag. I mean, they formed a clique and they're trying to get their bag to pump. And anything anything that doesn't help that is going to get forgotten quickly.

3:33:30Vlad CosteaUnfortunately, but I think Emin, I think is his name, Emin Gün Sirer or something. He's like this researcher who came up with Avalanche and he was at Cornell University. Yep. At some point in 2019, I think he posted that there are some connections to Epstein between lightning labs and whatever. And I kind of mocked him on Twitter. And now I realize, OK, this guy was actually spot on. Maybe he knew much more than I did. I think that's the thing. Like when you're part of a club and you're friends with some people, you sort of try to deny the information that comes out.

3:34:11Sure. You're doing your best to come up with rationalizations and say, "No, these guys are just evil and they're trying to destroy this group of nice people that I like." And I think that's what happened. And I owe Emin an apology if he ever joins my podcast, but he blocked me. I don't think maybe I meet him at a conference one day and I'll let him know. Yeah, but yeah, we don't ask enough questions. I think that's a recurring problem. And that's how we get captured.

3:34:43For sure. Yep. We end up getting funded by all sorts of shady people that we don't like. And then we go along with it because whatever we're doing fine. We're in a comfortable financial situation.

3:34:58Kurt Wuckert Jr.It's how they get you.

3:35:00Vlad CosteaThe fiat money printer. That's where the roots of all evil comes from.

3:35:05Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yes, a hundred percent.

3:35:09Vlad CosteaOkay, Kurt. Do you have anything to talk about or promote?

3:35:14Kurt Wuckert Jr.Just my stuff. I mean, gorillapool.com. You can check out my articles. I do a lot of research and I publish a lot of citations at kurtwuckertjr.com. And then you can check out our work at opl.dev. And then we also have bOpen.ai, which is a suite of tools for people that use Claude Code. They were built by our CTO. It's a whole suite of business management, cybersecurity tools, web development tools, as well as Bitcoin specific development logic. And it's all free. So if anybody wants to use Claude Code to build a business and do something really cool or just build an app or whatever, bOpen.ai is there for you.

3:35:58And if anybody has anything else they want to reach out and talk to me about, like send me a DM on X or send me a contact us on kurtwuckertjr.com and I follow up with everybody.

3:36:09Vlad CosteaYeah. And also, I'll make you a deal. I will follow up with my promise to upload this episode to the BSV blockchain, even though I will have to compress it. I think it's going to be larger than the block size. Yeah. So I will compress the video into maybe one gigabyte or something, and then I guess it will take up an entire block for this to be there. I promise to put it on Twetch.

3:36:33Kurt Wuckert Jr.We can mine four-gigabyte blocks. So that's your limit. Make it, like, 3.9999.

3:36:40Vlad CosteaI'm not sure. How much does this cost?

3:36:44Kurt Wuckert Jr.I don't know. 15 bucks, maybe. Like, probably one BSV, something like that. It's not crazy.

3:36:50Vlad CosteaYeah, I can do that. But I would also like to ask for a favor. I mean, I can also introduce it to people who are on my podcast, but I would be very grateful if you connected me to Mike Hearn. Like, I would love to have that guy.

3:37:04Kurt Wuckert Jr.Sure. I'd be happy to. I've not kept in close touch, but we've shared a couple of emails since he was on my show. So I'll let him know.

3:37:11Vlad CosteaI've been contacting him for like three years and he replied a couple of times and said he was busy. And after he did your podcast, he told me that he already did one that year and he doesn't want to do another one. And then I came back next year and the next year once again, and he hasn't replied. And I wish I would have interviewed that guy because he's such a wealth of knowledge. Like, yeah, without him, we wouldn't even have SPV in Bitcoin. Like Satoshi did not deliver with the stuff that he mentioned in the white paper.

3:37:44It was Mike Hearn who built the first SPV wallet and also payment channels, bloom filters, a lot of the stuff that became the Lightning Network later.

3:37:55Kurt Wuckert Jr.Yeah, he's an important guy.

3:37:57Vlad CosteaYou can't possibly hate him. Like, once you look at what he did, his actual work, you can disagree with his opinions, but you can't argue against his body of work. Right?

3:38:09Kurt Wuckert Jr.For sure. Yeah, I'll reach out.

3:38:12Vlad CosteaThank you very much, Kurt. We'll keep in touch. And to everyone who followed this, thank you for watching and listening. I'll put this on Spotify tomorrow. And thanks to the sponsors. Once again, Cake Wallet, who's giving this $100 in Bitcoin to the person who said 40 in the chat. I'm going to find you and I'm going to pay you soon. Braiins Hashpower, which is the place where you can rent hash rate. SideShift.ai where you should swap your stablecoins for something that nobody can take away from you. OrangeRock, the place to trade and LayerTwo Labs. They're launching eCash in a couple of days.

3:38:49Go to eCash.com to learn more. Thank you very much. And I'll see you in the next one.

3:38:54Kurt Wuckert Jr.Thanks, bye.